“Some Things Ya Ain’t Gonna Find Out” — Investigative Reporter Russ Baker’s Analysis regarding Unreliable Reporting about Osama bin Laden’s Execution — and the Role of Truth-Discovering Media in a Free Society

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 August 2011

 

 

Expecting the truth in critically important national interest situations is arguably unrealistic, even in a democracy

 

Russ Baker, an investigative journalist, did a credible job of debunking Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker report regarding SEAL Team 6’s execution of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

 

 

Citations

 

Russ Baker, Who–and What–Are Behind the “Official History” of the Bin Laden Raid?, WhoWhatWhy (17 August 2011)

 

Russ Baker, Who’s behind the New Yorker’s bin Laden story? The magazine's exclusive relies largely on second-hand accounts of officials who've long lied about the raid, Salon (17 August 2011)

 

Nicholas Schmidle, Getting bin Laden: What Happened that night in Abbottabad, New Yorker (08 August 2011)

 

 

An apparently money-making misdirection from The New Yorker

 

Speaking as a former historian, I didn’t bother to read Schmidle’s The New Yorker article.  Truthful details about the “get bin Laden” mission will have been so deeply classified that accurate facts are unlikely to surface for at least fifty years.

 

From my perspective, whatever Schmidle claimed to have discovered about the raid would have consisted of national security propaganda provided by American intelligence sources.

 

Journalist Russ Baker, apparently, had the same thought.  He just completed a thorough job of demonstrating why Schmidle’s report is unbelievable.  Baker’s article, though long, is worth skimming.

 

However, a caveat — Baker’s writing opens itself to conspiracy theorists’ wildest imaginings.

 

 

Baker’s implied conspiracy theory regarding the Administration’s probable cover-up

 

Baker goes further than I think warranted in bolstering his secrecy theory.

 

He wrote (in reference to Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker article):

 

•It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations . . . .

 

•It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.

 

•The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.

 

•The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.

 

•Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.

 

•Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.

 

•The eyewitnesses from the house -- including the surviving wives -- have disappeared without comment.

 

© 2011 Russ Baker, Who’s behind the New Yorker’s bin Laden story? The magazine's exclusive relies largely on second-hand accounts of officials who've long lied about the raid, Salon (17 August 2011)

 

 

The most chilling part?

 

Baker brings up the 06 August 2011 Chinook helicopter crash that killed 30 Americans, including a surprising number from SEAL Team 6:

 

We're told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raid -- but that none of the dead were present for the raid. . . .

 

Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raid -- or knew anything about it of broad public interest, we'd be none the wiser -- because, the only "reliable sources" still available (and featured by the New Yorker) are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.

 

Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn't ask about the core issues -- why this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.

 

© 2011 Russ Baker, Who’s behind the New Yorker’s bin Laden story? The magazine's exclusive relies largely on second-hand accounts of officials who've long lied about the raid, Salon (17 August 2011)

 

Baker is careful not to do more than whisper-imply the possibility of a murderous intelligence cover-up.

 

But he could not possibly be unaware that “tracks elimination” is the extrapolation that most readers will take from the juxtaposition of ideas in his closing paragraphs.

 

I won’t go there with him — if, indeed, he goes there himself.

 

A conspiracy of killing magnitude is not rationally necessary to explain the probable secrecy surrounding the Abbottabad raid.  And it overlooks the loyalty that military commanders almost always display toward their most elite troops. I find it absolutely unbelievable that the American intelligence apparatus, paranoid though it often is, could overrule stout-hearted and determined military combat commanders, when it came to murdering their own men.

 

 

So, what’s left? — A justifiable need for secrecy

 

National security concerns are sufficient to justify secrecy regarding the raid that got bin Laden.

 

The fact that secrecy was apparently camouflaged by manipulating Nicholas Schmidle and The New Yorker into publishing a bogus account is not surprising in a democracy that pretends to be transparent.

 

Freedom’s (definitionally necessary) transparency and national security are often at odds.

 

It is the balance between them that matters.  If the Administration concealed details of the Abbottabad raid, I don’t see a significant problem in that particular balancing of competing interests.

 

But I do see a problem with The New Yorker’s role.

 

 

The moral? — has more to do with (a) journalistic ethics and (b) journalism’s role in a free society, than with (c) national security, narrowly construed

 

Russ Baker’s opening paragraph made his essay’s most important point:

 

The establishment media just keep getting worse. They're further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways.

 

A significant recent example is the New Yorker's vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.

 

© 2011 Russ Baker, Who’s behind the New Yorker’s bin Laden story? The magazine's exclusive relies largely on second-hand accounts of officials who've long lied about the raid, Salon (17 August 2011)

 

Media pawns, yes.

 

I can justify national security secrecy.  I can tolerate Government’s propaganda in regard to concealing what it wants or needs to keep secret — especially when one considers the uproar that would come if the Administration had not pretended to release actual details about the SEALs’ bin Laden raid.

 

But essential to “freedom’s balance” is the media’s independent responsibility not to be sucked in by lies and manipulations of truth.

 

When we lose sight of our individual and institutional roles in maintaining the combative ecology of freedom, we lose it.

 

The New Yorker did American liberty no favors with its money-making publication of an almost certainly bogus story.  It abandoned its role as a rigorous truth-teller, thereby diminishing its credibility and that of its media peers.

 

When we can’t trust journalists to be oriented toward finding the truth, whose facts can we trust?