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Seymour Hersh thinks that President Obama’s account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden was a big lie. The writer makes the allegation in a new piece in the London Review of Books.
According to Hersh’s latest, not only did the Pakistani government assist with the killing of Bin Laden, but the Al Qaida leader was actually a prisoner in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan for several years before he was killed there in 2011.
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We all know the story. America’s vaunted Navy Seal Team 6 raided the compound where Bin Laden was hiding and killed the terrorist mastermind after intelligence confirmed that he was there. This was famously portrayed in the 2013 film “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The government of Pakistan was kept in the dark about the operation for fear that it would tip off Bin Laden, allowing him to escape.
But now the man who made waves with his book “October Surprise, ” in which he made the claim that President Raegan made a secret deal with Iran before the 1980 American presidential elections not to release the U.S. hostages before he won the Presidency – this later played into the whole “Iran-Contra” scandal – and who uncovered the story of Israel’s secret nuclear program, is calling President Obama a liar.
Hersh writes, “The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.”
And, “The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account.”
Hersh maintains that not only were Pakistani officials informed of the raid and included in its planning, but that Bin laden was actually discovered after the U.S. agreed to pay a $25 million bribe to a Pakistani who had the information.
The controversial author further alleges that there was no firefight at the compound nor any effort to capture Bin Laden alive, as the official American account of the events maintains. Hersh says that Bin Laden’s guards had already left the compound before the American team arrived, leaving him defenseless, and that the U.S. simply executed him.
It has been thirty years since Hersh’s “October Surprise” allegations and they are still not taken seriously. These new revelations are even more fantastic and hard to believe. The question is, “who will believe them?”
The one with the most to lose from this has to be Hilary Clinton who is now running for president again. She was famously seen in the middle of the picture which was released of Obama and his security people watching the raid in which Bin Laden was killed.
