{"id":182893,"date":"2015-05-11T17:42:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T22:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/11\/i-really-dont-know-what-to-make-of-this\/"},"modified":"2015-05-11T17:42:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T22:42:00","slug":"i-really-dont-know-what-to-make-of-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/11\/i-really-dont-know-what-to-make-of-this\/","title":{"rendered":"I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This"},"content":{"rendered":"

But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even \u00bc true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken<\/a>:*<\/sup><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama\u2019s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan\u2019s 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\u2019s account. The White House\u2019s 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\u2019s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.<\/span>

<\/span> The most blatant lie was that Pakistan\u2019s two most senior military leaders \u2013 General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI \u2013 were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she\u2019d been told by a \u2018Pakistani official\u2019 that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he\u2019d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who \u2013 reflecting a widely held local view \u2013 asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was \u2018quite possible\u2019 that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, \u2018but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo \u2013 if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.\u2019<\/span>

<\/span> This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden\u2019s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration\u2019s account were false.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger<\/a>, is:<\/p>\n