|
Why Is The Hersh Abbottabad Story Coming Out Now?
The Hersh story about the killing of Osama bin Laden gets trashed by the usual suspects in the main stream media. They have fallen for, and "reported", the story the White House and the CIA told them. To acknowledge that Hersh is mostly right on this would embarrass them too much.
But they could have known better. The Hersh story is not new. It is pretty much the same story R.J. Hillhouse told back in 2011. Her take was also somewhat confirmed by the former Pakistani Brigadier FB Ali at Pat Lang's site.
Hillhouse is now pissed, rightly, that the current Hersh story does not mention her account:
On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:
- The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction
- OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.
- The Pakistani Intelligence Service — ISI — was sheltering bin Laden
- Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive
- The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden
- Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL
- Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid
- The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials
- The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed
That all make sense and, as I do not believe that Hersh has a need to simply plagiarize her, is now confirmed by his sources.
The great heroic tales of the seals, the "torture let to bin Laden" claims by the CIA and all the other nonsense told about the event were just propaganda.
But one wonders why the story is coming out now. Sure it makes the White House look bad. It also lets the Pakistani generals look bad but only in the eyes of the Saudis. But it surely lets the Saudis look bad – those people who financed Bin Laden and paid the Pakistanis to keep him locked up. Who might have been that?
Coincidentally a piece in today's NYT about the new Saudi king gives hints:
In increasing the kingdom’s regional role, King Salman risks escalating the conflict with Iran, fueling further instability. And his support for Islamists could end up empowering extremists, just as Saudi support for the Afghan jihad decades ago helped create Al Qaeda.
…
King Salman has a history of working with Islamists. Decades ago, he was a royal point man and fund-raiser for jihadists going to Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere.
Salman just snubbed Obama by declining an invitation to Camp David. He is ignoring U.S. "advice" to stop the bombing of Yemen. Is someone trying to apply pressure on him.
It is always interesting when one sees such issues – the Hersh story, the NYT tale of his AlQaeda financing and Salman's resistance to the White House orders – come together at a single point in time. Is that directed or just coincidence?
I wonder if it was the ISI, and not the CIA, who pulled off some kind of intelligence coup. (I’m kidding)
@30, I agree with Noirette. A great and astonishing bit of theater could be an explanation, since OBL, if alive, had become irrelevant, and would be too sick to be running anything operationally. The Saudis were probably the real target, being most exposed at the moment; and yes,the US public was a fundamental target, as well,–the conditioning of the public mind.
I still can’t purge the image from my mind of those young American men in the streets in this country, besotted, bellowing their approval of this raid. The seminal event of their lives was the destruction of the WTC in New York City; and all they know of the world exists as the twisted view created by a hellbent, militarist war propaganda,–the disdain for truth of their own government.
The idea comes to mind that Obama’s cold-blooded, opportunistic, narcissistic double-crossing of everyone else, for the adulation he would receive, could have been predicted by psychologists who have had more than enough time to analyze his personality. There are surely techniques through which they could have stimulated this response, as well.
From Hersh’s story:
‘We thought the best way to ensure that [OBL’s] body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.
In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. […]
A major part of the US coverup , was the fiction of OBL’s burial at sea, aboard the Carl Vinson. Photographs of the shipboard burial were described in a magazine story; but the Vanity Fair author admitted later that the photographs he described came as second-hand knowledge (from a source he trusted), and he had not seen them himself.
A Freedom of Information Act request was sent to the Pentagon to obtain those photos.
[…] The Pentagon responded that a search of all available records had found no evidence that any photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all military computers and moved to the CIA , where they would be shielded from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption.
McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the medical office, and for command information and control. They show the sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded. (my emphasis)
Admiral McRaven is an interesting figure. After his work obstructing or frustrating Freedom of Information Requests, after the bin Laden raid, he has gone on to become chancellor of the University of Texas system. J.David McSwane writes about NORTHCOM’s Operation Jade Helm in the Statesman Of Austin, Texas. Seems like McRaven is some kind of authority on what is called “mastering the Human Domain“:
The push to expand the Special Forces foray into the social sciences can be traced to a 2013 white paper dubbed “Strategic Landpower: Winning the Clash of Wills.” It was penned by Gen. Ray Odierno, head of Special Forces command; Gen. James Amos, a Marine Corps commandant; and Navy Adm. Bill McRaven, now chancellor of the University of Texas system.
Part military doctrine, part response to budget constraints in Washington, the white paper makes the case for investment in Special Forces human domain efforts because, while the blunt force of the U.S. military apparatus is unrivaled, it is often not enough to achieve strategic goals in conflict zones.
A review of dozens of military policy documents, scholarly articles and congressional transcripts show McRaven was the vanguard in the push for more human domain training. In March 2014 testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Armed Forces, McRaven said: “As we look at the human domain, it’s kind of the totality of the cultural, the ethnic, the social fabric that makes up the people that live in a particular area. You have to know that before you can make any decisions.”
Posted by: Copeland | May 13 2015 4:44 utc | 52
|
