A journalist who alleges that the White House and Pakistani government conspired in 2011 to stage the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden is not being taken seriously this week by anyone in media.
For members of the press, there’s a glaring problem with Seymour Hersh’s 10,011-word exposé on the supposedly staged bin Laden raid: His report is based mostly on the say-so of a single “retired U.S. intelligence official.”
The source cited in Hersh’s bin Laden report, which was published this weekend by London Review of Books, is identified as a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.”
The White House is lying when it says that the night raid that killed bin Laden was an “all-American affair” performed without the knowledge of the Pakistani government, Hersh’s source said.
The Pakistani government knew of the raid, it knew of bin Laden’s presence and it worked with the White House to take out the Al Qaeda leader, contrary to the Obama administration’s version of events, Hersh’s source added.
However, because Hersh’s report relies almost entirely on anonymous sources, reporters and commentators are decidedly unimpressed with his supposed scoop, and they’re treating it accordingly.
For the Wall Street Journal, there are at least three good reasons why everyone should be deeply skeptical of the Hersh story, including the fact that Hersh’s main source is unnamed and therefore unverifiable.
After consulting Twitter for the Cliff Notes version of Hersh’s report, Vox’s Max Fisher penned an article, titled “The many problems with Seymour Hersh’s Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory,” casting serious doubt on the bin Laden scoop.
Slate’s Joshua Keating characterized the story as both highly improbable and tired.
Time magazine columnist Ian Bremmer accused Hersh of “jumping the shark,” something, he said, that has been a “long time coming.”
Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reported Monday that there appear to be several glaring errors in Hersh’s report, with his article stating in its subhead, “Sadly only speculation, much of it making little sense, and unnamed sources who wouldn’t seem to be in a position to know.”
GOP media strategist Rick Wilson said simply, “I have personally dealt with the blowback and fallout of Hersh-related stories when I was at the Pentagon. He. Makes. S–t. Up.”
Washington, D.C., insiders are similarly unimpressed with Hersh’s report, with many of them staking out positions Monday afternoon opposite of the longtime reporter.
“If you were to believe Sy you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Mike Morell were all lying to you,” former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said, referring to the former secretaries of defense as well as the former CIA director. “It makes absolutely no sense.”
Citing the mountain of media criticism Hersh’s report has received since its publication this weekend, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday, “The Obama White House is not the only one to observe that the story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. No one here is particularly concerned about it.”
Hersh, who is not new to media criticism, as several of his recent reports have received similar scrutiny and pushback from media and politico types, is standing by his report.
“I understand the consequences of saying what I’m saying,” Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his work uncovering the My Lai massacre, said in an interview Monday with CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “I’ve been a reporter, as you know, for 50 years in this town. Had a lot of good stories. A lot of the stories I wrote were pretty much on mark. Nobody’s perfect, of course. Everybody’s done bad stories.”
