IRAN

THE ABSURD TIMES

By now, the fascination (or pick a word) with Trump seems to be dead, so we can go on to other things.

This is despite all the reporters going out and digging up people that still support him, even people of color.  All it really indicates is how degenerate the human species is.  I am often reminded of what is supposedly a quote from Mark Twain as delivered by Hal Holbrook in that Twainish voice: "Man, we are told, is the reasoning animal.  Now I wonder who found that out." 

So, Israel is claiming that one of it's jets was shot down over Israeli airspace: in other words, the Golan Heights.  Actually, that is actually Syrian airspace, but repetition serves for truth these days and so it is.

This interview, below, is over a speech Nikki Haley made, not at the UN where she would have been laughed off the platform, but at a U.S. Military base.  See, the military is happy to see here because, if they are nice enough, they may get to march in a parade and salute the Donald.

We can forget about all the vets who are homeless, suffering from PTSD, missing limbs, and so on.  Some vets, believe it or not, after being welcomed into the military, are in danger of being deported.  Since they came here without being born here, but instead snuck over the border at the age of 3 or 4 years old, the evil and illegal aliens, we have no further use for them.  We want a parade.  Maybe a wall and a parade? 

Anyway, it takes a bit of history to follow this interview with Colin Powell's assistant, the guy who helped him write the speech that got us into Iraq in the first place.  Even this guy has taken to using Gore Vidal's phrase "The United States of Amnesia." 

So, how did it happen?  Well, we wanted to get "communists" out of Afghanistan.  (Never mind that the USSR was never really Marxist.  We needed an enemy and they supplied one for us).    So, we subsidized an bunch of crazy Jihadists (Hey, they believed in God and we Believed in God and the USSR was officially atheist, despite all the Russian Orthodox Churches) to attack them.  Our star player was Bin Laden, a fact so conveniently forgotten.)   He managed to get some place to crash into some building in New York and that gave the Chicken Hawks a chance to attack Afghanistan, and from there to Iraq.

Then there was Saddam Hussein, very valuable in waging war against Iran.  However, he had an uncomfortable way of helping Palestinians, so he had to go.  We started out by claiming that he had nuclear weapons, but we knew that was not true.  We do not attack countries with nuclear weapons.  We finally settled on weapons of mass destruction.  Actually, Bin Laden thought of Saddam as an infidel.

Well, we decided that Saddam had to go.  The rest is explained in the interview:

Fifteen years ago this week, Secretary of State General Colin Powell gave a speech to the United Nations arguing for war with Iraq, saying the evidence was clear: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It was a speech Powell would later call a blot on his career. Is President Trump doing the same thing now with Iran? We speak to Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. He recently wrote a piece titled "I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It's Happening Again."

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to look at the growing threat of war against Iran. In recent weeks, senior members of the Trump administration have repeatedly tried to churn up U.S. support for a war against Iran, while President Trump has reiterated his threats to pull the U.S. out of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Last month, President Trump issued a waiver to prevent the reimposition of U.S. sanctions against Iran, but warned he would not do so again unless the nuclear deal is renegotiated. The waiver must be reissued every 120 days to avoid the sanctions from kicking back in.

His warning came after U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley spoke at the Anacostia-Bolling military base in Washington, D.C., in front of pieces of metal she claimed were parts of an Iranian-made missile supplied to the Houthis in Yemen, which the Houthis allegedly fired into Saudi Arabia. This is Ambassador Haley speaking December 14th.

NIKKI HALEY: Behind me is an example of one of these attacks. These are the recovered pieces of a missile fired by Houthi militants from Yemen into Saudi Arabia. The missile's intended target was the civilian airport in Riyadh, through which tens of thousands of passengers travel each day. I repeat, the missile was used to attack an international civilian airport in a G20 country. Just imagine if this missile had been launched at Dulles Airport or JFK or the airports in Paris, London or Berlin. That's what we're talking about here. That's what Iran is actively supporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Weapons experts widely criticized Ambassador Haley's speech, saying the evidence was inconclusive and fell far short of proving her allegations that Iran had violated a U.N. Security Council resolution. But to our next guest, Haley's claims were not only inconclusive, they were also oddly reminiscent of the false claims about weapons of mass destruction the George W. Bush administration used to sell the public on the war with Iraq.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, during which time he helped prepare Powell's infamous speech to the U.N. claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Powell's speech was given 15 years ago this week, February 5th, 2003.

SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL: One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

AMY GOODMAN: That was then-Secretary of State General Colin Powell speaking February 5th, 2003, before the U.N. Security Council. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, his chief of staff, has since renounced the speech, which he helped write. Well, his new op-ed for The New York Times is headlined "I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It's Happening Again."

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about what—how you felt at the time, how you came to understand the evidence that General Colin Powell, who himself said—called this speech, later, a blot on his career—how you put this speech together, and the echoes of it, what you hear today, in Ambassador Haley's speech.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, we put the speech together with, arguably, the entire U.S. intelligence community, led by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, literally at Powell's right hand all the time, seven days, seven nights, at Langley and then in New York, before we presented.

When I saw Nikki Haley give her presentation, certainly there was not the gravitas of a Powell, not the statesmanship of a Powell, not the popularity of a Powell. What I saw was a John Bolton. And remember, John Bolton was her predecessor, in terms of being a neoconservative at the United Nations representing the United States. I saw a very amateurish attempt.

But nonetheless, these kinds of things, when they're made visual and the statements are made so dramatically, have an impact on the American people. I saw her doing essentially the same thing with regard to Iran that Powell had done, and I had done, and others, with regard to Iraq. So it alarms me. I don't think the American people have a memory for these sorts of things. Gore Vidal called this the "United States of Amnesia," with some reason.

So, we need to be reminded of how the intelligence was politicized, how it was cherry-picked, how we moved towards a war that has been an absolute catastrophe for the region, and even, long-term, for Israel's security and the United States' perhaps, with a deftness and with a fluidity that alarmed me then. It really alarms me now that we might be ready to repeat that process.

And your previous speaker, on North Korea, there's another target. This president has so many targets out there that he could avail himself of at almost any moment, that we have to shudder at the prospects for war and destruction over the next three years of Donald Trump's term.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the pieces of metal she was talking about?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I can't imagine how anyone could haul some metal in front of the TV cameras and assert, the way she did, with the details she did—some of which was false, just flat false—and expect anyone within any expertise, at least, to believe it. Open parenthesis, (The American people don't necessarily have that expertise), close parenthesis.

Look at her statement about "this could have been shot at Dulles, or it could have been shot at Berlin." Had it been shot at Dulles or Berlin, it would have stopped well short, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean or even shorter. These missiles are not long-range missiles. These missiles are very inaccurate missiles. They have a CEP of miles. That means that, unlike a U.S. nuclear weapon, which would hit within a 10-meter circle or less, it would hit within a mile or two circle. They don't know where it's going to hit when they shoot it. It's not very accurate, in other words.

So the things that she was presenting there, she was presenting with a drama, that even if what she was saying fundamentally was true, that the Houthis got it from Iran and shot it at Saudi Arabia, it simply was so exaggerated that one just looks at it and says, "I can't believe that the United States is represented by that woman."

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, it's very interesting that you have this moment now in U.S. history where the Republicans—some of them—are joining with President Trump in trying to discredit the intelligence agencies. And yet you go back to 2003, when you have a fierce criticism of the intelligence agencies, saying they were being used to politicize information, which, oddly, is what President Trump is saying, in a very different context.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: You would have a lot of sympathy if you asked me if I have some doubts about the U.S. intelligence agencies, all 17 of them now, definitely. But let me tell you what I've done over the last 11 or 12 years, on two university campuses with really brilliant students, in terms of enlightening myself, gaining new insights into what happened not only in 2002 and '03, but what's been happening ever since and, for that matter, what happened ever since Richard Nixon, with regard to the intelligence communities.

What happens is you get people like Tenet, you get people like John Brennan, you get people like John McLaughlin, you get people like Chris Mudd, for example—Phil Mudd, who was head of counterterrorism for George Tenet and who tried at the last minute to get me to put even more stuff into his presentation about the connections between Baghdad and al-Qaeda. You get people like that who are at the top. That screens all the many dedicated, high-moral, high-character professionals down in the bowels of the DIA, the CIA, the NSA and elsewhere. That screens their views, which are often accurate—I'd say probably 80 percent of the time very accurate—from the decision makers. So what you get is you get people like Tenet and McLaughlin and Brennan, who shape whatever they can to fit the policies that the president wishes to carry out. The intelligence, therefore, gets corrupted. So, in that sense, I am still down on the, quote, "U.S. intelligence community," unquote.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it's really interesting, because a number of the people you mention from the past are the current commentators on television.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yes, yes. John McLaughlin—John McLaughlin lied to the secretary of state of the United States on more than one occasion during the preparation for the 5 February, 2003, U.N. Security Council.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Trump speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don't think you've heard the last of it. Believe me. It is time for the entire world to join us in demanding that Iran's government end its pursuit of death and destruction. It is time for the regime to free all Americans and citizens of other nations that they have unjustly detained. And above all, Iran's government must stop supporting terrorists, begin serving its own people and respect the sovereign rights of its neighbors.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, respond to President Trump, and talk about the clock being put ever closer to midnight.

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: That agreement, the JCPOA, the nuclear agreement between the U.N. Security Council permanent members, Germany, Iran, that agreement is probably the most insidious and likely way to war with Iran. The Obama regime, in a very, very difficult diplomatic situation, achieved the best it could. That best is a nuclear agreement that keeps Iran from a nuclear weapon and gives us over a year of time, should they try to secretly break out of it, to inspect and find and to stop, even if we had to bomb. So it is an agreement unparalleled in regard to stopping Iran's search for, if it ever had the desire to, a nuclear weapon.

If Trump undermines that, if this administration undermines that, then there is no—and they are moving fast to do that—there is no other alternative, if you look at it. Now, my colleagues and some of my opponents in this will say, "Oh, no, that doesn't necessarily mean war." It certainly does, if you continue this march towards Iran's—unacceptability of Iran's having a nuclear weapon, because then we will have intelligence telling us that Iran is—I know the Foundation for Defense of Democracy and others will never let this rest. We will have everyone telling us that Iran, whether they are or not, is going after a nuclear weapon, once the agreement is abrogated. That means the only way you assure the American people and the international community, the region—Saudi Arabia is salivating for a war with Iran, with American lives at the front—that means the only way you stop Iran, under those circumstances, is to invade—500,000 soldiers and troops, you better have some allies, 10 years, $4 [trillion] or $5 trillion. And at the end of that 10 years, it looks worse than Iraq did at the end of its 10.

That's what you're looking at over the long haul, if you say this agreement is no good and abrogate it, because if it's still unacceptable, that Iran not get a nuclear weapon, the only way that you assure that is by invasion. Bombing won't do it. All bombing will do is drive them underground. They will develop a weapon. They'll work with the North Koreans and so forth. We know they have worked with the North Koreans in the past. And they will develop one. And then they'll be like Kim Jong-un: They'll present us with the fait accompli.

Nuclear proliferation is a real threat right now. And I agree with the Bulletin of Atomic—the Atomic Scientists Bulletin that the hands on the Doomsday Clock are now at two, two-and-a-half minutes or so from midnight. We are more in danger of a nuclear exchange on the face of the Earth than we were in probably any time since 1945. And that includes the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and the Berlin crisis that more or less preceded it. This is a dangerous time, and we have a man in the White House who is a dangerous president.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, on Wednesday, Defense Secretary James Mattis defended a Pentagon request to develop new so-called low-yield nuclear weapons, telling reporters the U.S. needed a more complete range of nuclear options. And this comes as the Trump administration has unveiled its new nuclear weapons strategy, which involves spending at least $1.2 trillion to upgrade, they say, the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Your response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Make that about two to three, maybe even four, trillion dollars, because that's what the cost overruns will be, and that's what we'll spend over the next 10 to 15 years to do this. And we do not need it. Just look at some of the components of this. We're looking at a B-21 bomber for the Air Force, for example, that's going to be so expensive the Air Force won't even tell the Congress how much it's going to cost. We're looking at a nuclear-tipped cruise missile for that bomber, which negates the need for the bomber. It's redundant, but we're going to do it anyway.

This is to assuage the military-industrial complex in America that deals with nuclear weapons. This is to spend lots of money and keep lots of nuclear scientists and others in their jobs. I understand that, but I don't condone this kind of money being spent. This is to respond to the Russians, whose military doctrine now includes using small-yield nuclear weapons, should they be invaded by NATO. It's written in their doctrine. This is to further perturbate the situation with the Chinese, who are taking Mao Zedong's nuclear philosophy and throwing it out the window and thinking, "Oh, maybe we better build lots more nuclear weapons so we can ride out a first strike and retaliate." This is all because of the United States. It's all because of what's happening in the world post-Cold War, that we all thought was going to be more peaceful and is turning out to be more catastrophically dangerous.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, Trump just tweeted, "Just signed Bill"—he's talking about the spending bill. "Our Military will now be stronger than ever before. We love and need our Military and gave them everything — and more. First time this has happened in a long time." Your last 10-second response?

LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Yeah, not the first time. Ronald Reagan did it, '82, '83, '84. And he did it on politicized intelligence about the Soviet Union. We knew it was falling apart at that time, but that didn't go along with his arms buildup. That's exactly what Trump is doing. And he's using the military to gain more votes.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as the secretary—as the chief of staff of the secretary of state, of Colin Powell, from 2002 to 2005.

That does it for our show. A very happy birthday Mohamed Taguine!

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Hersch, Killing Bin Laden, and the Media

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

Illustration:  You know who.  It is amazing how few illustrations of him seem to be available on the Web.

            By now, all the controversy over Seymour Hersch's article on Bin Laden has died down.  There was at first a flurry of activity denouncing it, then some sort of agreement, explicit or not, to simply ignore it.  Most of those involved did not read the report and those that did flocked to the major networks and corporations in order to suppress it.  Now it is time to take a look at it and find out what is actually there.

            One issue not mentioned anywhere, and still ignored, is the information we were given during the Bush II years that Bin Laden was on dialysis.  These were times that he supposedly was hiding out in the mountains.  It was always puzzling to us as to how he managed to run a dialysis machine up in the mountains.  Those things are big, require a great deal of power, and are not easily concealed.  Still, this evil mastermind operated, sending out video tapes that today look like lectures and discussions.    

            So consider what one of those machines looks like:

 

Now imagine someone carrying it on his back up a steep mountain in winter, barefoot.  If you were able to do that, your imagination is better than mine.

            So, can we believe it?  Can we believe that we simply chopped up bin Laden's body into pieces, we had the Pakistani authorities helping us, we ... and so on?  Well, look at it this was: last week was the commemoration of the "Disaster," the day that Israel was created and imposed on the Palestinians.  We did not hear a word of it on our media in the U.S.  On the other hand, we heard hours of condemnation of Seymour Hersch.   So yes, we can believe it.

            One other thing: we created Bin Laden and did it because we wanted to hurt the Soviet Union (they were atheists and we were blievers so that went over big in the Middle East).  Al-Qaeda means "foundation," or "Base," and that is where Daesh (or ISIS) started.  Al-Qaeda kicked them out as being idiotic, but the fact remains that we supported them, called them "Rebels" for a long time.

            Anyway, here is the reported himself:

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2015

Seymour Hersh Details Explosive Story on Bin Laden Killing & Responds to White House, Media Backlash

Four years after U.S. forces assassinated Osama bin Laden, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has published an explosive piece claiming much of what the Obama administration said about the attack was wrong. Hersh claims at the time of the U.S. raid bin Laden had been held as a prisoner by Pakistani intelligence since 2006. Top Pakistani military leaders knew about the operation and provided key assistance. Contrary to U.S. claims that it located bin Laden by tracking his courier, a former Pakistani intelligence officer identified bin Laden’s whereabouts in return for the bulk of a $25 million U.S. bounty. Questions are also raised about whether bin Laden was actually buried at sea, as the U.S. claimed. Hersh says instead the Navy SEALs threw parts of bin Laden’s body into the Hindu Kush mountains from their helicopter. The White House claims the piece is "riddled with inaccuracies." Hersh joins us to lay out his findings and respond to criticism from government officials and media colleagues.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Four years ago this month, President Obama announced U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in a raid on his hideout in Pakistan.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: At my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

AARON MATÉ: But now a new investigation says the official story is a lie. In an explosive report, the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh alleges a vast deception on everything from how bin Laden was found to how he was killed. According to Hersh, Pakistan detained bin Laden in 2006 and kept him prisoner with the backing of Saudi Arabia. In 2010, a Pakistani intelligence officer disclosed bin Laden’s location to theCIA. Hersh says the U.S. and Pakistan then struck a deal: The U.S. would raid bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, but make it look as if Pakistan was unaware. In fact, Hersh says, top Pakistani military leaders provided key help.

AMY GOODMAN: The report also challenges the initial U.S. account of how bin Laden was killed. Hersh says there was never a firefight inside the compound and that bin Laden himself was not armed. Questions are also raised about whether bin Laden was actually buried at sea as the U.S. claimed. Hersh says, instead, the Navy SEALs threw parts of bin Laden’s body into the Hindu Kush mountains from their helicopter. The White House has rejected Hersh’s account of the bin Laden raid. Press Secretary Josh Earnest spoke to reporters on Monday.

PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: I can tell you that the Obama White House is not the only one to observe that the story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods. The former deputy director of the CIA, Mike Morell, has said that every sentence was wrong. And, Jim, I actually thought one of your colleagues at CNN put it best: Peter Bergen, a security analyst for CNN, described the story as being about 10,000 words in length, and he said, based on reading it, that what’s true in the story isn’t new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true. So I thought that was a pretty good way of describing why no one here is particularly concerned about it.

AMY GOODMAN: In a statement, White House national security spokesperson Ned Price said, quote, "There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece ... to fact check each one. ... [T]he notion that the operation that killed Usama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false," he said. But despite the White House denials, none of its statements have addressed Hersh’s specific allegations.

Meanwhile, other reporting is beginning to corroborate some key elements. According to NBC News, three intelligence sources have backed Hersh’s claim that the U.S. heard about bin Laden’s location when a Pakistani officer told the CIA. The U.S. has said it helped find bin Laden by tracking his personal courier, which Hersh says is a ruse. The NBC sources also backed Hersh’s contention that the Pakistani government knew all along where bin Laden was hiding.

Well, for more, we go directly to Seymour Hersh, whose 10,000-word article, "The Killing of Osama bin Laden," appears online at the London Review of Books. It’s Hersh’s latest major investigation in a body of work spanning decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. forces killed hundreds of civilians. In 2004, Seymour Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

Seymour Hersh, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you, in your own words, describe what it is that you found?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you guys did a pretty good job. Basically, you covered the tracks. Basically, I think you can say, simply, that the president, as he said on television when he announced the raid, did order the raid, and the SEAL Team Six, the most elite unit we have in our special forces group, they did conduct a mission. They did kill bin Laden. They did take the body. That’s all true. And the rest of it is sort of hooey.

AARON MATÉ: Can we talk about what seems to be the most shocking claim: Pakistan finding bin Laden in 2006 and the U.S. not finding out until 2010, when you allege a Pakistani officer told the U.S., and meanwhile, Saudi Arabia backing and paying for bin Laden’s imprisonment. This seems very improbable, involving hundreds, thousands of officials in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and then the U.S.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Where do you get the notion of hundred or thousand officials? We’re talking about a closed society. The White House has a lot of control over the information. The senior Pakistani officials have control over the information. We are talking about a country that went, a dozen or 10 years ago, through a WMD sort of cover-up. The notion that there’s some major conspiracy I’m alleging is just sort of—that’s over the top. There’s no major conspiracy here. It’s very easy to control news. We all saw that when—the whole thing about Saddam Hussein and the alleged nuclear weapons. I should think that would be a model for why you might just not be so skeptical of the possibility of holding things. And let me also say, in the piece, it’s not so much that I’m saying what happened. I’m quoting sources. And of course they’re unnamed. You just announced what happened to Jeffrey Sterling today. I mean, what reporter would want to name a source in this administration. You know, bam! He’d be gone. So, there you are.

What simply happened is, at a certain critical point, we had a walk-in. We were very angry about it, the United States. Pakistan is our ally. And underneath all of this, you have to understand something, which I’m sure you do. Just to tell the audience, Pakistan has, what, one, 200, maybe more—they’re still making, producing enriched uranium, etc., etc. And they have a great deal of nuclear weapons. I mean, I would guess they’re up to 200 now. It was 100 a half a decade ago. And so, we have to have comity between the ranking American generals and the ranking Pakistani generals. This is something very important to us. The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, helps train the people who guard the weapons. We work with Pakistan very closely to watch out—literally, with them—to monitor the people who are in control of the weapons, to make sure nobody is a secret nationalist or a secret jihadist who might grab a weapon and do something crazy with it. That’s a serious, big issue that’s sort of under—that’s behind the whole relationship. We give Pakistan a lot of money through Congress over the table, and we give a lot of money to the leadership under the table. So we have a great deal of—and we also understand Pakistan has its own agenda.

And so, '06, they did grab bin Laden; ’010, we learn about it. We're angry. We don’t tell the Paks we know right away. We begin looking at Abbottabad, where he’s located. We start observing him. This has been reported. We set up a team in a nearby house, mostly foreign nationals and Pakistanis who work with us, to monitor the house. We go to the president. The community goes—intelligence community goes to the president with the information about the walk-in. Any guy that wants to sell information for money is automatically suspect, so you have to be careful. The president is appropriately very cautious, very cautious. He’s not going to make a move. He doesn’t want to end up like Jimmy Carter in the desert, you know, 1980, you know, that failed attempt to rescue the American hostages, which hurt him politically terribly. It’s a year before an election. He’s not very popular in America. Not much is going right. He’s in a constant fight with Congress, etc., etc., etc.

So, we determine the only way we can be sure that we’ve got the right guy and that this will work is we have to go to the Pakistanis. So we go to the leadership—General Kayani, who’s the head of the army, and General Pasha, who’s the head of the internal—what they call the ISI, Inter-Services Intelligence unit, the counterpart to the CIA. We go to those people. We lay out our case. We make it clear that a lot of goodies are going to be cut off. There’s F-16s that are in the pipeline. We’re going to slow it down. We’re going to slow down congressional money, etc., etc. They have very little option. OK, they start working with us. We set up a four-man team in a place called Tarbela Ghazi.

These are all details that—this is a 10,000-word article. I mean, this is a lot of information in this article. We set up a team—none of which the White House is responding to; instead are just saying—they keep on saying, "It’s so many falsehoods, we can’t correct it." And, by the way, the last time I—quoting Peter Bergen—I don’t know the guy. I’m sure he believes what he believes. But the last time the White House actually quoted a reporter in the way they did would have been Dick Cheney quoting a story by Judy Miller and Mike Gordon in The New York Times at the height of the WMD crisis about the tubes that allegedly could be used for making—delivering nuclear weapons, a story that they had planted in The New York Times and then Cheney on 60 Minutes goes and uses that story as a—to buttress the argument. We know that. That seems to me to really—just get on with it, White House. Just start denying specifics.

Four-man team in Ghazi, Ghazi Tarbela, a very important base in Pakistan. A lot of black operations are run with us and the Pakistanis out of it. It’s not that well known. There’s an airbase there, but there’s also a covert unit. The Pakistanis also train most of the guards who monitor and watch over the nuclear weapons there. So it’s a—we’re there. We’re getting—our team is collecting data on the place in Abbottabad, where bin Laden—you can call him a prisoner, under the supervision. There were steel doors leading to his apartment that were locked. He was on the third floor of this complex there. There were a number of buildings in the compound. And we have great detail. We’re learning how thick the steel is, how much dynamite you need to blow it, how many steps are going, who else is there. This is all being passed by the Pakistanis to us.

The whole game, and the whole crux of the story I’m writing, is that nothing was supposed to be made public after the raid. The SEALs were supposed to go in—and you have to understand, we’re talking about two Black Hawks full of SEALs, packed to the brim. SEALs basically are better off with eight to 10 people, and they had 12 in each of them. They were—the plane was stripped down. They were coming in heavy. And 24 SEALs going into a compound where, presumably, if it was a secret raid, there would be somebody with arms. Certainly, if Pakistan itself wasn’t guarding it with armed people, bin Laden would have armed guards, because he’s a man that a lot of people want to get to. They’re going in—just repelling down was the plan, you know, perfect targets for anybody with a BB gun. And they’re going to go in like that without any air cover? It’s a story that it is—and bin Laden, the most hunted man in the world at that time, since 2001, he was number one international terrorist. He’s going to hide out in a compound—Abbottabad is sort of a resort town—in a resort town 40 miles or so outside of Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, within a mile or two of Pakistan’s West Point, where they train young officers, the army does, and a couple of miles from a regimental headquarters full of army troops. He’s going to hide out there? I mean, as I wrote in the article, it’s a Lewis Carroll story. It just doesn’t—it doesn’t sustain any credibility, if you look at it objectively.

And so, the deal was it was not to be announced. We were going to go kill the guy. That was, of course, the mission. That’s why the president had to talk about a firefight. There was no firefight. They’ve actually acknowledged that within a few days of the raid, the White House did. Bin Laden did not have an AK and wasn’t being—cowering behind some woman, as was initially said. There was—the point being that, as I write very carefully in this article, seven to 10 days after the body—the killing was done and the body was taken away, we were going to announce, the White House—the president, himself, was going to announce that a drone raid somewhere in the Hindu Kush mountain area—you know, Waziristan, it’s not clear, it was going to be vague as to whether it was—that’s the area that divides Pakistan and Afghanistan, mountain area. It was going to be vague as to which country this took place in. Somewhere in that border area, a drone raid hit a building. We sent in a team to look at it. There was a tall guy that looked like bin Laden. We took some pictures, some DNA. My god, we got him. That was the announcement. That protects everybody. Pasha and Kayani are working with us, and nobody has to know it.

Why are they worried about being told? At one point in the last six or seven years, 8 percent—that’s the popularity of America in Pakistan, was 8 percent. Bin Laden was hugely popular. If it was known to the public that Pasha and Kayani, the two leading generals, had worked with us to kill the guy, they would be in real trouble. They’d have to move to Dubai or have armed guards.

So, once the president did it—this was done without notice. And I’m—of course, as the—you quoted some officer saying it was unilateral. It was all American. Yes, Pakistanis were not involved in a raid. Our SEALs were. And so, I wish—as you said in the intro, Amy, the denials are all sort of non-denials.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, before we get to the denials, with your sequence of events, you say they killed him, Obama didn’t plan to announce it right away. What happened? And what happened to Osama bin Laden’s body, according to your account?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. You have to understand this is caveated in my article. What I said was that the SEALs initially reported that—first, they put a lot more bullets in it than has been publicly said, not in the head, but in the body. There were six SEALs. SEALs work—SEALs are funny. They work in teams of six because that’s how many fit into a dinghy, although, God knows, since this war began, the war on terror, the American SEALs don’t go near the water very much, which is a source of great annoyance to them. They’re no longer water people; they’re just regular ground guys. The initial account—and I do have access to people who had access to it. I’m sorry I have these sources. I just do. And I’m sorry other reporters don’t, but I just do, and that’s just the way it is. And they did talk about throwing out parts of the body over the Hindu Kush mountains from the chopper, because it was shot up pretty badly. The head was intact.

Anyway—and, by the way, if you think about the sequence I’m telling you, that you’re going to find another bin Laden somewhere, you don’t need the body. The only reason they took the body, they needed to take the body, is because the Pakistanis wanted it out of there. They didn’t want anybody to know anything about this. And we just followed their orders. And so, what happened is, that night—you know, it’s funny, I remember this vividly. Around 9:00, I think it was, CNN or somebody began to report it on the night that the raid was announced. The night of the raid, after its success, there was reports that something had happened to bin Laden, something was coming very quickly. Two-and-a-half-hour debate, two and a half hours of—as I understand, the debate was simply with a lot of people around Obama saying you cannot trust this story to be kept for seven to 10 days. Among other things, the secretary of defense, Bob Gates, who had been very critical of the plan, very, very critical, as he wrote in his memoir, very upset about what happened, they just—he might start talking, somebody might start talking, they’d start blabbing, and you lose the edge, Mr. President. This is re-election time, and presidents do strange things before re-elections—often strange things. We know that.

And so, Obama delivered a speech that was written by his political people and not cleared by the national security team. It was a speech with—I can’t begin to tell you Obama’s state of mind. As far as I know, he got a speech, he believed everything he read. He was—you know, he’s getting briefings. He believed what he was read. I’m not accusing him of lying. But what happened, what was said was a lie. And in the speech, he laid down the foundation for an enormous scramble over the next weeks, that the next days and weeks they had to recreate a new story. He said, as you said in the introduction, there was a firefight, and Obama was—and bin Laden was killed in it. That’s to cover the idea that it was an out-and-out murder. And he said also, in the fight, that—he also said that a treasure trove of material was recovered. We have yet to see it, and I raise a lot of questions about what was covered, what was collected. At one point, the SEALs were said to have taken 15 computers out of there. But if you read everything that was written, it also was written and said many times there was no Internet connection in Abbottabad. There was no sign of any operational capability of bin Laden at all. And one of the problems with the—protecting the walk-in, when you—you had to protect the walk-in. One of the reasons you didn’t want to talk about a walk-in was you don’t do that. And so, we had to protect that—

AMY GOODMAN: You mean the guy who revealed to the U.S., walking into the U.S. Embassy.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah. Yeah, they call him a walk-in. And the president actually said in his speech, we had a lead in—he said we had a lead in August of 2010, which, really, for a lot of people in the intelligence community, that was too close to the mark. A lead means something specific happened then, and that’s when the walk-in went to see a guy named Jonathan Banks, the station chief, a very competent guy from everything I hear; the station chief for the CIA in Islamabad. And we had to call in—lie detector people from Washington had to fly in to debrief the guy and conclude he was telling the truth. It was a big piece of evidence. Anyway, but you have to get around that story, so you create the courier story, that the CIA, with brilliant work—and initially they wanted to say through enhanced interrogation—found out about a courier who led them to bin Laden. That is such a—that is really an outrageous story, and they sold it to a movie called No Easy—what was it?

AMY GOODMAN: Zero Dark Thirty?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Zero Dark—Zero Dark—that was the thesis of the movie. It also included the torture element. Absolutely not so. What happened is we had a guy walk in. NBC—NBC last night about 6:00 put out that story saying it, and you hardly saw it today. There was a piece I read in The New York Times this morning that didn’t deign to mention that an independent network had confirmed one of the major elements, not only a walk-in, but it raises questions about the couriers that they talk so much about. And so, it’s not—

AMY GOODMAN: Sy—go ahead.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me just say this. Here’s my theory about this. You know, there’s been a—in Europe and the rest of the world, they’re more open-minded, more willing to say, "Oh, terrible things happen." In America, I think, one of the problems with the press—and this is just a heuristic thinking, there’s nothing empirical about what I’m saying—I think one of the things that’s got them so agitated—people were writing stories accusing me of plagiarism in the press in the last two days. You know,Politico, which does great stuff, has a blog in which they said this sort of wacky stuff. A 10,000-word article that’s plagiarized? Anyway, I think there’s a sense that everybody bought into the story. Everybody bought into the story after 9/11. The White House had it going. They had the press begging for more information. Briefings were given. The stories initially had—if you remember the initial stories, they had bin Laden ready with an AK, and they were shooting in the doorway, etc. The only firing that came across in the first wave of after-action reports was a stray bullet apparently hit a woman in the leg who was screaming, either before or after the bullet hit her, I don’t know. But there was no murder in the—you know, there was no killing of people in the courtyard. If there had been a gun in the courtyard, if anybody had had a gun in the courtyard, it was cleared by the—Pakistani intelligence cleared all of the guards out before the SEALs landed. If anybody had a gun in the courtyard, the SEALs wouldn’t have gone near the courtyard the way it did, just flying in, you know, like in a World War II movie. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Sy, we have to break, but we’re going to come back to this discussion.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist. His latest piece in the London Review of Books is headlined "The Killing of Osama bin Laden." It tells a very different story than the one we were told in the United States by President Obama. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Our guest is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who just published a piece in theLondon Review of Books called "The Killing of Osama bin Laden." It tells a very different story than President Obama told the United States after Obama—after Osama bin Laden was killed.

AARON MATÉ: This morning on CNN, Philip Mudd, CNN’s counterterrorism analyst, discussed Sy Hersh’s reporting.

PHILIP MUDD: The assertion is not that somebody down the chain in the Pakistani military or security services might have known something. The assertion is that senior Pakistani generals, including the head of the security service, knew for years. So while that security service was losing officers in the fight against al-Qaeda, they were also at the same time secretly sheltering the head of al-Qaeda. I mean, let me break some news for you this morning: Aliens abducted President Obama 15 minutes ago, and Darth Vader is in the Oval Office making decisions for the United States. I have a secret source who told me that. Why don’t we publish? This is nonsense. This is just ridiculous.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Philip Mudd of CNN. Sy Hersh, do you want to respond to that? Darth Vader in the White House.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, of course not. I don’t care.

AARON MATÉ: OK, well, then, let me—

SEYMOUR HERSH: I mean, that’s—I mean, look, that’s childish. The reality is, the Pakistanis told—there were meetings between the head of the Pakistani intelligence service, General Pasha, and Leon Panetta, that I write about. And I write about them based on—well, you have to read the article to find out. I write about them very carefully. One of the questions always asked is: Why did you do this to us? And particularly, why bring in the Saudis? What happened is, the Pakistanis, as some of you may know, are very close to Saudi Arabia. There’s always been a chronic fear that the great Islamic bomb—at some point, Pakistan might even give the Saudis a bomb. That’s been written about constantly. That’s a great concern. We really have a serious concern about maintaining great relations with—they’re very good right now with us and the Pakistani military, anyway.

And so, the answer that was given, I’ll just tell you exactly what it was. The way they explained it is, first of all, the—they went to—they told the Saudis, and the Saudis immediately said, "Do not tell the Americans about him." Why? And I can only give you the obvious reason that was given, because the last thing Saudi Arabia wants is the United States to begin interrogating Osama bin Laden and discover who might have been giving him money—which sheikh, where—in Saudi Arabia in '01 and ’02, and before or even after. That's not completely illogical.

The second reason, of course, is, once the Pakistanis have bin Laden, they have leverage. They can let both the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan know that they have him. They can let the jihadists in both countries also know that they have him. And they get leverage. They can make it clear to both those groups: You have to talk to us more than you do. We want to know more about what’s going on, or we’ll string this guy up. That’s all—that was the explanation given. Nobody liked it, but there was an understanding that Pakistan has its own point of view about the world, and it isn’t always the same as ours. So we accepted it. We had not much choice. We wanted their help. But so, it’s not a question of Darth Vader and sort of silly talk like that. This is serious stuff I’m talking about. This is the president of the United States, if not knowing the wrong information was given, certainly countenancing it, in fact sending it—triggering a whole sequence of lies that had to be—a whole story had to be recreated.

And nobody is talking about what I wrote about this poor Dr. Afridi, the one that’s now in jail on charges—he was convicted of treason, reviewed and now in jail on charges of murder for 33 years or something like that. This is the guy that was going around in—providing vaccinations for various kinds of illnesses, hepatitis, I think, among them. I don’t think it was polio, but he was providing that kind of service to the community. A physician, and he was also an asset of the CIA, and we were so worried, in America, that the story about—we got DNA via the Pakistanis before the end of—before 2010. You needed DNA. You needed the Pakistanis to get into Abbottabad to get into and take some DNA from bin Laden—we had other samples from his family—and make sure—the president wanted to know that was really bin Laden. And so, a doctor, a Pakistani doctor, had—was assigned to—his name was [Aziz]. Amir [Aziz] was assigned to move next door to the house in Abbottabad. In fact, journalists, after the raid, found his name in Urdu on a doorplate in one of the houses next to it. They had to protect Aziz, and so they created a story, the CIA in their wisdom, that Afridi was the one that went in and tried to get into the compound to take—unsuccessfully, to take—to get a DNA sample from bin Laden, which of course led to a huge outcry against the idea that the Western intelligence, media, the CIA and the Brits, also often criticized for the same way, are behind some of the vaccination programs. This is a belief that’s certainly prevalent in Africa. And we had tremendously adverse consequences for the health of—

AMY GOODMAN: Sy, we have 10 seconds.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, the implications for the health and well-being of a lot of people are pretty negative from this, a very dumb move by the CIA. These are all things to be considered. It’s not a Darth Vader moment, I’m sorry to say.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist in Washington, D.C.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll link to your piece in the London Review of Books called "The Killing of Osama bin Laden."

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