In a Seemingly Universal Culture of Lies and Misdirection — How Can anyone Know whether Seymour Hersh’s Alleged Expose of Osama bin Ladens Execution Is Bogus?

© 2015 Peter Free

 

20 May 2015

 

 

A lot of folks frothily claim that Seymour Hersh’s account of Osama bin Laden’s forced departure from this vale of tears is completely made up

 

But in a culture of government secrecy, how do they know?

 

 

Ahmad Zaidan’s critique is representative

 

He said:

 

 

The latest "investigative" reportage of Seymour Hersh about US President Barack Obama's version of Osama Bin Laden's assassination in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad has raised more questions than answers.

 

Like Saddam's arrest, Washington opted to mislead and misinform the world about the circumstances relating to OBL's eventual elimination through a clandestine marine operation. Ironically, many established journalists get lured into creating fiction or reporting hearsay as the "inside story".

 

Hersh is the most recent among them to succumb to the temptation of sensationalism. His anonymous sources are either Americans or Pakistanis.

 

There does exist an eyewitness with a credible and less politicised perspective on the happenings of May 2, 2011 and before. She is Amel al-Saqa, bin Laden's Yemeni wife. The journalist forgets to inform his readers as to whether he met or even tried to speak to her. I'm inclined to believe that she remains a treasure trove of untold information.

 

Hersh's expose tries to establish that Pakistan had been keeping bin Laden in safe custody since 2006 near Abbottabad. The Pakistani military allegedly sold him for $25m, a difficult assumption to digest for those who know Pakistan and the operations of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Both stakeholders, the US and Pakistan, denied the journalist's claims.

 

© 2015 Ahmad Zaidan, Seymour Hersh's OBL fantasy, Al Jazeera English (19 May 2015)

 

 

Tell me how Mr. Zaidan’s musing BS is any different than what Mr. Hersh wrote

 

Mr. Zaidan surmises that bin Laden’s wife is probably a treasure trove of “less politicised” information. There are four unsupported assumptions in that observation alone:

 

 

(1)  Amel al-Saqa knows a bunch.

 

(2) She is not a political creature.

 

 

(3) She bears no angry resentment about her husband’s death, which presumably took place in front of her.

 

(4) And she has the courage to speak out, no matter which deadly people she would piss off in doing so.

 

Whose imagination is running wild?

 

How are Zaidan’s conjectures different than Hersh’s?

 

 

Consider the context in which these criticisms of Hersh are made

 

Given that:

 

 

(a) the Obama Administration almost certainly lied about aspects of what happened

 

and

 

(b) knowledgeable sources have all been presumably ordered to stay quiet or provide camouflaging information —

 

it seems that

 

(c) journalistic critics are hypocritically giving Mr. Hersh an impossible hill to climb.

 

 

In a culture of continual deceptions . . .

 

Most of Hersh’s claims seem as potentially believable as that which the Obama Guild has trotted out.

 

Even Navy SEALs (who presumably were there) disagree about what took place and who did what to whom.

 

 

The moral? — The wordy battle over Seymour Hersh’s expose, fraudulent or not, merely demonstrates what a truth-avoidant culture we have become

 

The Obama Presidency’s over the top secrecy, and the national security apparatus that underlies it, intentionally create an impenetrable fog. Lies and misdirection govern everything American.

 

The foundational premise for republican democracy has been undercut. An informed public is absent. Why would anyone rational think that any of us are knowledgeably competent enough to hold any of our mendacious politicians and military folk to democratically governed account?

 

In fairness to Mr. Zaidan, Seymour Hersh probably is wrong — if only because the details of the bin Laden killing are presumably so tightly guarded.

 

But that gives me no countering confidence in our political and military leaders, who have almost unanimously made an uninterrupted art form of lying their fool heads off.

 

American democracy has been bought and un-truthed to death.

 

The sad thing is that most of the public seems to accept this as necessary. Which does not say anything morally favorable regarding our level of personal truthfulness in ordinary life. Once we rationalize that obliterating accuracy is necessary in some situations, we give ourselves excuses to do it continually.