Separating Fact From Seymour Hersh’s Fiction About bin Laden By Michael Morell…See note please
http://www.wsj.com/articles/separating-fact-from-seymour-hershs-fiction-about-bin-laden-1431714139
Seymour Hersh is a blackbelt cad, cur, liar and scoundrel. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman “Every word Seymour Hersh writes is a lie, including and and the. “….rsk
Mr. Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, is the author of “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism—From al Qa’ida to ISIS,” published this week by Twelve.
Osama’s body was chopped up and dropped from a helicopter? That’s odd. I saw video of his burial at sea.
As a career intelligence officer, I learned that there are few things in life of which you can be absolutely certain. But I am positive that a lengthy new article by journalist Seymour Hersh, which is getting widespread attention with a whole new tale about how Osama bin Laden was brought to justice, is wrong in almost every significant respect.
ENLARGE I can be certain because I was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency when senior officials from our Counterterrorism Center first brought to CIA Director Leon Panetta and me the news that they had trailed an individual whom they believed was a bin Laden courier to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And I was there for every meeting that followed as we worked through the evidence that led our analysts to conclude that the most-wanted man in the world was hiding at the compound.
So I had good reason to know that Mr. Hersh’s 10,000-word story in the London Review of Books was filled with falsehoods. But here’s something I got wrong: I was certain that Mr. Hersh’s allegations would be quickly dismissed. After all, there was a public record about the raid in statements by the White House, Pentagon and CIA, and in books by former officials such as Mr. Panetta, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others. Then there were the media appearances by the Navy SEAL who says he personally shot bin Laden. It should have been clear that either Mr. Hersh’s version of the truth was bogus or that we all had participated in one of the most successful and complex conspiracies in modern history.
Despite the many and obvious holes in Mr. Hersh’s story, his allegations gained some traction. A number of respected news organizations ranging from the New York Times to NBC News picked up slivers of information in Mr. Hersh’s account and essentially said, “Yeah, we heard something like that too.” Almost all of these accounts were attributed to anonymous former officials—many of whom admitted having at best secondhand information. Incredibly, these “I know a guy, who knows a guy who swears that . . .” accounts were given credence over on-the-record statements made in the past four years by people who were in the room—or on the scene.
Mr. Hersh has appeared in the media in recent days saying that when I and others asserted that his report was wrong, we were offering “non-denial denials” because our objections lacked specificity. All right, let me specifically address his major allegations.
• Mr. Hersh says the White House lied when it asserted that the bin Laden raid was, as he puts it, an “all-American affair and that senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services agency (ISI) were not told in advance.” The truth is that the decision not to tell the Pakistanis was made early in the discussions of our options. We would have liked to have made the raid a joint operation with the Pakistanis—what better way to strengthen the bilateral relationship?—but we simply couldn’t trust that someone in the Pakistani system would not tip off bin Laden. I was present during all of these discussions when it was resolved that we wouldn’t inform Pakistan until after the fact.
• Mr. Hersh claims that the Pakistanis cleared the way for U.S. helicopters to cross their airspace. Wrong again. With Director Panetta, I was in the CIA operations center for the raid monitoring the Pakistani response, concerned that they would detect the flight as it crossed the Afghan-Pak border and flew to its target in Abbottabad.
• He claims that we learned of bin Laden’s location not from following the courier and from excellent intelligence analysis, but from a Pakistani intelligence officer who walked into the U.S. Embassy and gave us bin Laden’s whereabouts in exchange for “much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.” The truth is that while walk-ins have long been useful in providing intelligence to us world-wide, none of the information that led to finding the location where bin Laden was came from walk-ins.
• Mr. Hersh’s account is full of laughable dialogue. For example, he claims that when we first told the president about bin Laden’s possible whereabouts, the president said: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.” Nonsense. I was there. After the president’s first briefing, he gave us two orders: Find out more about what was going on in the compound and don’t tell anyone else about it. Mr. Hersh’s American source claims to have been close to the operation. The source wasn’t in the room.
• Mr. Hersh says we obtained DNA samples from people in the bin Laden compound before the assault was launched. Wrong again. We would have liked to have obtained samples from the children in the compound to confirm that they were bin Laden’s children, but we did not. Again, Mr. Hersh’s source was far from the action.
• As off base as Mr. Hersh’s article is on the events leading up to the attack, he is even more mistaken regarding its aftermath. His claim that the president’s announcement of bin Laden’s death accidentally revealed facts that required subsequent cover stories is wrong. The president’s statement read from the East Room of the White House on May 1, 2011, was quickly crafted but also carefully vetted to ensure that it didn’t reveal information that needed to remain secret but also to ensure that it was accurate.
• Mr. Hersh’s sources tell him that there was no treasure trove of intelligence collected by the SEALs in Abbottabad. Once again, he needs better sources. I have seen the material and can attest that it was and is enormously helpful to us. We were surprised to learn from the documents how heavily engaged bin Laden was in managing the day-to-day operations of al Qaeda (far from being the “prisoner” of the Pakistanis that Mr. Hersh portrays), and we learned of bin Laden’s continued obsession with attacking the U.S.
• Finally—and most absurdly perhaps—Mr. Hersh cites his sources as telling him that SEALs threw bin Laden body parts off their helicopter over the Hindu Kush and suggests that the burial at sea from the USS Carl Vinson never happened. Bin Laden’s body received a proper Muslim burial at sea. How do I know? I heard the president give the order, and I saw photographs and video of the burial at sea.
Mr. Hersh makes many other claims. I won’t address them here simply because there isn’t room, but please don’t interpret that as a signal that he got something right. The article is one of the most badly flawed documents ever produced by a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Of that, I am absolutely certain.
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