A new article published Sunday claims that President Obama lied to the American people about the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Seymour Hersh’s shocking new article in the London Review of Books outlines narrative discrepancies in the Obama administration’s account of the killing bin Laden and accuses the president of rushing to take credit for his death.
Hersh based his report on a on anonymous source. This individual, he wrote, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”
Through this source, Hersh said he uncovered four of the biggest lies that the American people were fed by the Obama administration. These include that the mission was a solely American, that bin Laden died in a firefight, that the Pakistanis knew nothing of the siege beforehand, and that the Navy Seals collected a massive amount of data, including computer hard-drives that they stored in black garbage bags.
In fact, Hersh claims in his piece that the Pakistani government knew full well the bin Laden had been living in Abbottabad for years. They had even captured him and forced him to live there, basically as a prisoner.
“The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him,” Hersh wrote.
“Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. ‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’ the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision,” he went on.
Pakistani officials also helped collect DNA to prove to the Obama administration that Osama bin Laden was in fact living in the Abbottabad compound and provided a basic blueprint of the compound, according to Hersh.
Pakistan helped out because they feared that American aid would be cut off.
Once the decision had been made that the Obama administration would send the Navy Seals to kill bin Laden, Pakistanis were in open agreement that they would not interfere with American helicopters. ISI guards who guarded the compound were told to leave the minute they heard American helicopters. The author also claims that ISI was responsible for cutting off electricity to the town.
Despite the official account of the Obama administration, Hersh said that only two people were fired upon — a stray bullet that hit the leg of one of bin Laden’s wives and bin Laden himself. There was no firefight, no guards shooting at the Americans military.
He also claimed that it wasn’t two bullets to the head that killed bin Laden, but six Navy Seals that surrounded him and fired upon him relentlessly.
Hersh also claims that bin Laden had no computers that the Seals stuffed into black garbage bags. Other than a few books and pieces of papers, there was nothing. According to the piece, bin Laden was not running a command center for al Qaeda from the compound.
Potentially most damaging for the White House from Hersh’s account are his claims about how Obama decided to get in front of the story ahead of the Pentagon and to have many in the White House leak false facts and information in order to boost the story.
The White House dismissed Hersh’s article Monday as baseless.
White House National Security spokesman Ned Price said, “There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one.”
