Showing posts with label Hersch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hersch. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Syria and Mission Creep, Obama, War, Bin Ladem



THE ABSURD TIMES





Too Much BS in the World
By
Papa Yaga



Illustration: Osama – buried at Sea?


This is a transcript of the interview Amy Goodman did this week with Seymour Hersch.  He is a very worthwhile journalist and exposes many things that we knew but could not prove.  Some are a bit strange, but then we have given a whole new meaning to "strange" this Century and it looks as if this will continue, only accelerate.

This link has been retweeted greatly on Twitter, reliked to an amazing degree on Facebook, and generally made the rounds.  However, I promised to make the transcript available here as well and so here it is.

There is only one thing I find even more strange.  Remember there was no sign of Bin Laden's dialysis machine where he was supposedly captured and then "buried at seas with full Islamic funeral" stuff, ya da da da.  This after carrying the machine over the mountains of Afghanistan for years, if you will remember.  Now Hersch has him in Saudi Arabia, or so it seems.  Everything seems to go well until the end when he suddenly seems to forget who said what to him when, or doesn't want to say, and so on.  Amy said they would continue off the air, but I have yet to find that clarification  If I do, I'll send it around.
 
President Obama has announced the deployment of 250 more Special Operations troops to Syria in a move that nearly doubles the U.S. presence in the country. This comes just days after the Obama administration announced 217 more troops would be sent to Iraq to help in the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. As the U.S. expands its presence in Iraq and Syria, we speak with the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has just published a new book titled "The Killing of Osama bin Laden." In the introduction, Hersh writes: "It's now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that Obama's foreign policy has maintained many of the core elements of the Global War on Terror initiated by his predecessor—assassinations, drone attacks, heavy reliance on special forces, covert operations and, in the case of Afghanistan, the continued use of American ground forces in combat. And, as in the years of Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let alone victory, in the fight against terrorism."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We're on a 100-city tour marking Democracy Now!'s 20th anniversary. Today, we're broadcasting from the Roundhouse, the Santa Fe, New Mexico, Legislature, here in Santa Fe.
President Obama has announced the deployment of 250 more Special Operations troops to Syria in a move that nearly doubles the U.S. presence in Syria. This comes just days after the Obama administration announced 217 more troops would be sent to Iraq to help in the fight against ISIS. Earlier today, President Obama addressed the wars in Syria and Iraq during a speech in Germany.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Right now, the most urgent threat to our nations is ISIL. And that's why we're united in our determination to destroy it. And all 28 NATO allies are contributing to our coalition, whether it's striking ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq, or supporting the air campaign or training local forces in Iraq or providing critical humanitarian aid. And we continue to make progress, pushing ISILback from territory that it controlled.
And just as I've approved additional support for Iraqi forces againstISIL, I've decided to increase U.S. support for local forces fightingISIL in Syria. A small number of American Special Operations forces are already on the ground in Syria, and their expertise has been critical as local forces have driven ISIL out of key areas. So, given the success, I've approved the deployment of up to 250 additional U.S. personnel in Syria, including special forces, to keep up this momentum. They're not going to be leading the fight on the ground, but they will be essential in providing the training and assisting local forces as they continue to drive ISIL back.
AMY GOODMAN: As the U.S. expands its presence in Iraq and Syria, we turn to the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, when U.S. forces killed hundreds of civilians. In 2004, Sy Hersh broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He has just published a new book titled The Killing of Osama bin Laden. In the introduction, Hersh writes, quote, "It's now evident, fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, that Obama's foreign policy has maintained many of the core elements of the Global War on Terror initiated by his predecessor—assassinations, drone attacks, heavy reliance on special forces, covert operations and, in the case of Afghanistan, the continued use of American ground forces in combat. And, as in the years of Bush and Cheney, there has been no progress, let alone victory, in the fight against terrorism."
Seymour Hersh, it's great to have you back on Democracy Now! Congratulations on your book. Why don't we start by talking about what President Obama announced in his speech in Germany today, just hours before this broadcast: increased troop presence in Syria. What does it mean?
SEYMOUR HERSH: First, happy anniversary. Glad you're still around, kiddo.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, one of the words he doesn't mention is Russia. Look, I can't begin to tell you what's in his mind. It's a little amazing at this stage he's putting more forces in, but that's—you know, that's his prerogative, I guess, as president. Always makes good news. Nobody ever—nobody seems in this country ever to object too much when we put more people on the ground.
But the real winner in the last year or so of the war there has been the Russians. And the Russians—the bombing was much more effective. If you remember, the president had said publicly, when Putin decided to put his air force hard at work there, he said it would be a quagmire, they wouldn't be able to get out, it's going to be, you know, schadenfreude—it would be like what happened to us in Afghanistan, and is happening to us, and certainly did happen to us in Vietnam. But they did it. They came in, and they did very well.
I will tell you right now, Russian special forces are in the fight against ISIS with the Syrian army, with Hezbollah, with the Iranian army, the Quds Force. And the Russians have done an awful lot to improve the Syrian army in the past year—retrained them, reoutfitted them, etc., etc., etc. It's a much better army since the Russians came in. The fighting in Palmyra that the Syrian army and the Russian special forces did was much bloodier. ISIS fought to the death. It was a terrible toll on everybody, but it was a victory for the Syrian army. We know all these things. The Syrian army is much better. It's probably going to—probably—we don't know. I don't know. Nobody knows. It will probably take Raqqa, the former capital city, if you will, ad hoc capital city ofISIS. ISIS is on the run, particularly in Syria, not necessarily in Iraq.
And I just don't understand what the president is doing, why he wants to engage more. But, you know, it's not my call. I would also—I've been told there are many more forces in Iraq than we're publicly announcing, including even some elements of one of our airborne divisions. What the hell? As usual, we don't really know what the game plan is. I do not understand why he's decided to jump into a war that was being run by—it's being won right now by the Syrian army and its allies, including Russia. I just—I can just speculate that our anti-Putin, anti-Russian instinct in America continues apace. That's all.
AMY GOODMAN: In your introduction to your new book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden, you write, "In a review of my interviews about Obama's early decision to raise the ante in Afghanistan, one fact stood out: Obama's faith in the world of special operations and in Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan who worked closely with Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2008 as director of [JSOC] the Joint Special Operations Command." Seymour Hersh, can you elaborate on this?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it's amazing. Look, you win the presidency—hope and peace, or whatever it was—and you discover, because of—you know, you don't have the power you might dream you would have. You can't get a lot of things done, because you've got a very hostile Congress. And so—and presidents, inevitably, in frustration—look, I've been in this town since the '60s. There's nothing more wonderful for a president—you can feel more like a president by taking a walk with somebody from the Special Operations community or, earlier, the CIA in the Rose Garden, and getting rid of somebody you don't like, whether you're—in the case of—what we do now is we do targeted assassinations. Earlier, I think we just moved them out of office or did operations, you know, political operations. But now it's really just, you know, we hit people. You know, there's a weekly meeting in which they go through names of people to target, assassinate, including, in some cases, an American, without any due process. It's been a wonderful movement. I don't mean to be too sarcastic about it, but what—you know, this guy ended up in the same place in far too many times, as you read and as I wrote, as Bush and Cheney were.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what these Special Ops forces are doing, both in Iraq and Syria?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I really don't know. I mean, I know what I'm told, but I just don't know what the truth is. Clearly, they're going to be engaged more. They're helping to plan operations. But I—we're great at—we do a lot of dirty tricks in the world. You know, we were inside Iran in the first decade of this year, when the—before the Iranians began to talk seriously about getting rid of their nuclear weapons, that don't exist, that never did exist. We were doing operations inside the Iranian—the borders, and also we even went inside Tehran with surrogates. I mean, yes, we went inside Tehran. We did monitoring for nuclear activity, etc., etc. So we've been deeply involved in that world in covert operations. And how much first-hand stuff, I don't really have. I haven't actually talked to somebody who was in Tehran, but we were doing a lot of stuff, including working with people who were doing stuff like blowing up mosques and trying to whack Iranian scientists. So I assume—one target I do know, the president has designated, is he really wants to take out Mr. Baghdadi, the head of ISIS. He's been a high-priority assassination target for more than a year. We could be doing something like that.
But we're certainly working with the—there's not much you can do in Iraq, because the Iraqi army—you know, it's the usual story: They're going to run away. We've been—one of the great classic lies of America is, every year, some two-star general who's involved with training either the Afghans or, in earlier years, the Vietnam—Vietnamese, or the Iraqi army, they come before Congress. And the two-star looks them in the eye. He's the general in charge of training, and his promotion depends on not so much what he does, but what he says, I guess, at this point. And he tells the Congress how wonderful it's going on, we've got x number of divisions ready to fight. And the congresspeople all nod. It's a little parody that goes on. And, of course, the armies cut and run, and they're no good, and they haven't been. And the Iraqi army we have right now, that we're talking so wonderfully about, is not going to go near Mosul. It's going to be hand-to-hand fighting. If we ever do go into Mosul, we're going to [inaudible]. So, there you are. You know, I—
AMY GOODMAN: Were you—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, I'm sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, were you surprised by President Obama's announcement today in Germany?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Horrified. I just don't think it's the way to go. I think it's just putting us into—you know, as you mentioned in your introduction, we've been doing this war against terror, against an idea, since after 9/11, you know? And how are we doing, fellas? How's it going there? You know, has the amount of opposition to us spread? Has the hatred of America grown more intense? We are truly a very much hated country in the Middle East. And it's partly because of the way we fight our wars—with drone attacks and a lot of force, the prisons that we did. And Abu Ghraib was just one of many prisons. And a lot of killing goes on by us, you know.
And here's how things have changed, for me, anyway. I'm writing the same kind of stories now about this president, very critical stories, because, you know, somebody has to hold him to—you know, at least based on what I think is as good as evidence I've ever had in all the stories I wrote for The New York Times in the '70s. I was there for six, seven, eight years as a sort of a hotshot there in the Washington bureau. And I wrote a lot of stories, won a lot of prizes, going after the president, going after wars, going after Kissinger, writing about illegal activities. And all of a sudden, the same stories, still anonymous—I mean, I wrote them anonymously then, and I'm writing them anonymously now. And some of the people I knew then, believe it or not, are still operating now. And it's like, we can't do that. It's like the American press has moved to the right, as many elements in this country, as you see, when the Sanders case has moved to the left. It's a much more outspoken opposition to some of the things we—the way we run campaigns. And underneath that is—of those people who support Sanders, also really dislike much more intensely the wars that are going on and the lies that are being told. But, you know, times have changed.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, we're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're speaking to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh for the hour today. He has a new book out; it's called The Killing of Osama bin Laden. We're going to also talk about that, the latest in what's known about the killing of bin Laden in Pakistan, the Saudi government's support for him in hiding there, what the U.S. knew, as well as many other issues. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.

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As we turn right now back to Seymour Hersh, who has a new book out—it's calledThe Killing of Osama bin Laden. Sy, I want to ask you about the presidential race. Last year at a debate in New Hampshire, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders accused former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of being, quote, "too much into regime change." This is what he said.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: But I think—and I say this with due respect—that I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be. Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region. Yes, we could get rid of Gaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS. So I think, yeah, regime change is easy, getting rid of dictators is easy. But before you do that, you've got to think about what happens the day after.
HILLARY CLINTON: Now, with all due respect, Senator, you voted for regime change with respect to Libya. You joined the Senate in voting to get rid of Gaddafi, and you asked that there be a Security Council validation of that with a resolution. All of these are very difficult issues.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders debating in New Hampshire a while ago. So, Seymour Hersh, if you could talk about this issue and this most recent news, Charles Koch, the Republican megadonor, the oil baron, saying he could see himself actually supporting Hillary Clinton over a Republican nominee.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I don't believe that for a minute, but that's another story. What Koch said, I think that's just all part of pressure to get rid of Trump, who, in some ways, Trump's pretty—I mean, who ever heard of a Republican talking about "NATO is useless"? Which, of course, pretty much a lot of people I know believe it is pretty much useless. There's a lot of things Trump said that are pretty remarkable. He would talk to Putin, etc. It's a pretty interesting campaign on the Republicans, how they're sort of internally eating up themselves.
But Sanders is right, of course, about that issue. I don't think Sanders is as sound on foreign policy as I'd love him to be, I wish him to be. I don't think he really—he doesn't quite understand the consequences of—he doesn't—I don't think he's terribly—he just hasn't done enough to make me comfortable. But, of course, Hillary—my favorite line about Hillary Clinton is, after Gaddafi was executed—as you know, he was killed by his own people. He was actually sodomized by swords. It was a horrible death. And she said on one show, "We came, we saw, and he died," with a laugh. And that kind of talk is sort of almost bizarre.
You know, here's what I think about this campaign. It doesn't—you know, it's clear where my political thoughts are, but it's—for me to say who I'm going to vote for and all that, I don't think anybody—you know, I'm not a political leader. That's not what I'm into. But I will say this: Something that's amazing is happening in this country. And for the first time, you know, I do think it's going to be very hard for a lot of the people who support Sanders to support Hillary Clinton. Now, times can change. There's a lot more time to go. We've got months before an election and a convention, etc. But at this point, I'm at the point where—I go back to the old days. Remember, if you—you might not remember. We had a lot of talk about a third party in America, a progressive third party. Barry Commoner was one of the people who was going to run it. It went nowhere. But there's really—it seems to me, with what's going on now with these people, 45 and under, the enormous support they're giving to Sanders, just we know by polling, etc.—doesn't always show up in the—it turns out, in the election results. I mean, it certainly didn't show up in New York. And so—but they are there. There's a whole group of young people in America, across the board, all races, etc., etc., who have just had it with our system.
And there's something wonderful in the—you know, look, I've been to Israel many times, have a lot of friends there, and there's a lot of very good people there, but we all know it's headed for—it's chaos coming. And here we have a guy running for president. This is something, I guess, you know, forbidden—a forbidden statement. But he's the first Democrat since I've been watching politics, 50—I'm old, older and crankier than Bernie. But anyway, it's the first Democrat that I can remember that actually did not have to go to the Jewish community in New York to get money to run. And that's something amazing. We may be able to actually change our policy and let the Israelis know that there's going to have to be a settlement—not just divided, not just two countries, but a real settlement, a peace settlement, in that area.
And we've seen some terrific changes happening in this election, as the Democratic Party has been moving to the left, with a lot of contempt for the way the party manages itself, by the people who are pro—working—are interested in Sanders, that look at the chaos on the right. Our system is basically breaking apart right now in this election. And you can only say, "Yay! It's great!" So, it's inchoate. It's not very good. It's a little bit like the new generation of journalism we have with the tweeting and—you know, and blogging, that's going to clearly replace the newspapers, which are dying as we sit, every day. It's all sort of a new world coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy, President Obama appeared on Fox News on Sunday a few weeks ago, and he was asked what was the worst mistake of his presidency. This was his response.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond, and particularly focus on Hillary as secretary of state under President Obama?
SEYMOUR HERSH: First of all, you're just going have to take my word for it. Gaddafi was a tame cat. We got to him in the Bush-Cheney years. If you remember the history, we had a lot of bad trouble. Bush and Cheney were—I think normally would be embarrassed, should have been embarrassed, by the lies they told and the mistakes they made—let's put it that way—about the WMDs that the—Saddam did not have an ongoing nuclear weapons system, which was known to an awful lot of people before—before we took over Baghdad and discovered nothing. At that point—I think it was a year later, in 2004—suddenly, Gaddafi, after allegedly having caught—we caught a ship full of some dual-use goods, and we stopped a ship that was going to Tripoli with it. He suddenly announced that he was giving up—unilaterally going to give up all his chemical arsenal and his WMD, his nuclear plans or options. And it was a big victory at a very much needed time by the Bush and Cheney crowd, that was a victory that showed our policy is working right. Money was involved, the CIA, covert money. A lot of stuff was going on. As you know, I've been doing a book about Cheney for a long time. And I can tell you that it was a considerable amount of CIAactivity involved to turn him around.
I don't think—which is amazing—it's clear to me that the president and Hillary, the secretary of state, did not know about this secret agreement made. It's just amazing to me that one administration will leave—it's one of the things I first learned from a friend who went to work—I think it was way back—maybe it was for Clinton. This friend got a job, a high-ranking job, in the government. The first thing he discovered, that all the files related to everything significant that had happened, all the agreements that had been made in his area—it was in the State Department—had been gone, had been cleaned out. Nothing was left. So, they were—you know, as I said, they were going after a guy that had been doing a lot of good work for us, believe it or not, horrible as he was. He was a horrible human being. Bad things happened inside that country to the people. But he was actively working with us on the al-Qaeda issue, and, you know, if the—I don't believe al-Qaeda exists there. I think the al-Qaeda we talked about disappeared with bin Laden. There's just copycats, and we like to call it al-Qaeda. But Sunni jihadists, Sunni Salafist and Wahhabi extremists are spreading all over, in part in response to what we did after 9/11. But that's the story we all know. So, they didn't really know what the hell had happened with Gaddafi. They took out a guy that didn't need to go. And the French were pushing for it, and we went along. It looked good.
It's a little bit like putting a couple hundred guys, and maybe a lot more that we don't know about, into Syria now, and many more than that into Iraq, where the—God knows what's going to happen in both places. It's just—it's done without consulting the Congress, which probably this Congress probably doesn't want to be consulted, but that's the—you know, the Constitution is not a nuisance, as many in the Republican Party, as Bush and Cheney, and now, in many areas, even Obama believes, it seems to be a nuisance. We don't tell Congress anything. We don't go and—we don't tell the people anything. And the control—the control of the media that goes on now, the major media, is, I think, much more acute now. I can go days wondering, you know, why we don't do more aggressive reporting on certain things.

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.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today, 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.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Obama speaking in May 2011. Sy Hersh, your new book, titled The Killing of Osama bin Laden, you argue the official account of how bin Laden was found and killed was deceptive. Explain what you think really happened, and talk about the role of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and, of course, the United States.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, one of the myths that was created was that we discovered where he was living. Abbottabad is about 50 or 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad. It's a hilly, higher elevation. And in the summer, it's a resort place for many of the people who go—many of the people in the government and the military take their vacations there. It's sort of a Pakistani Martha's Vineyard, if you will. And anyway, he was there.
What I know, as in "know," is there was a walk-in, that in August of 2010, a Pakistani—I can say right now, he was a colonel in the regular army, not in the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, which is a very tough bunch, a separate group. He was an officer who had been passed over for general or whatever, and was—came into our embassy. We have a station chief there who's quite—quite competent guy named Jonathan Bank. And he went in to him and said, "We've had bin Laden for four years." ISI got him. The Pakistani intelligence service picked him up probably in the Hindu Kush area, in the areas—the mountain area between Pakistan and Afghanistan—where we thought he was. He had been on the run for—let's see, since late 2011, when we drove him out of Afghanistan into the mountain region. And we finally got him. We looked for him. We thought we had him in '02. There was a firefight that nobody knows about yet, with the SEALs. But anyway, we finally got him because of a walk-in. And you have to know, in the business of the CIA, protecting a walk-in is the most important thing. And so, a walk-in. And so, if you have a bunch of people somewhere in the basement, intelligence officers working on trying to track him through couriers, you may let them think that they did do it, because that's just the way it works in the CIA. You know, they don't always tell the truth to their people that work for them, when it comes to protecting a source, somebody who walks in.
And where I was dumb—you know, this story, I initially wrote much of this in theLondon Review, oh, about—last year sometime, caused a lot of trouble then. And what I did then, I was so naïve. I thought I had a dog-that-didn't-bark issue. I thought, I'm going to put the name of Bank in there, high in the story, in the—maybe seven, eight graphs into the story. I'm going to say the walk-in went to Jon Bank. And that's—I was going to take a chance that Bank would not succumb to pressure. A knew a lot about him. He's a Harvard grad, very bright guy, very competent. And I just didn't think he would be trotted out by the CIA to say, "What? What's Hersh writing about? I don't know anything about a walk-in." And I thought the fact that I named him and he said nothing after I wrote the story would be important to the media. But it wasn't, and nobody paid a bit of attention. And he didn't do—he didn't. Instead, they trotted out a retired guy that was plugging a book, named Morell, whose book was—let's see, I think it was 53 pages of criticism by the Senate Intelligence Committee for something like 78 lies, or maybe it's 78 pages for 53 lies, that had been published. They just trashed him for the book. And yet, he would go on on television and go after me, nobody asking him about his previous lies in his book. Anyway, big deal.
What's important is, the story we got is that—and I must say, when you do a story like I did, I did have more contact with people in the ISI after I wrote. I learned much more, that was totally—gave me much more flesh on the skimpy bones I guess I had. The first thing the Pakistani high-level—very close to the Saudis. The two generals in charge, General Kayani, who was at the time head of the army, and General Pasha, head of the Pakistani intelligence service, were the two key guys for us. And why so we—Pakistan is very important to us, because they have over a hundred bombs, and it's one of the big national security issues for us constantly. Where are the bombs? Are they telling us the truth? Are they keeping some out of the count? As somebody once said to me, "Are they hiding a few bombs in the tall grass along the runway somewhere?" And that's always our worry.
AMY GOODMAN: Nuclear bombs, you're talking about.
SEYMOUR HERSH: We worry about it. It's, I would say, one of the more acute issues. We don't want—Pakistan is very close to the Saudis, very close. There's a lot of close relationships. Pakistanis go and they work in the security area there, etc. There's always been a fear that one bomb would get transferred somewhere. It's just one of our more rational fears in foreign policy. And we work very hard at it. And so, what happened is, we were stunned when the—
AMY GOODMAN: You're talking, Sy, about nuclear bombs, right? Atomic bombs.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, oh, my god. Serious nuclear bombs, ranging from small, little, hand-held ones to the major, major ones that can—you know, that mimic some of the high stuff we have—not ICBMs, but they can be delivered by airplane. Anyway, what happened is—
AMY GOODMAN: Sy—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: I just want to say, we only have a minute to go, and I want to get—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, I'm sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: —to the issue that you allege, that the Saudi government was—was funding Osama bin Laden—
SEYMOUR HERSH: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: —in Abbottabad, in Pakistan.
SEYMOUR HERSH: The Saudi government was funding—we got him in '06. We learned about him in 2010. We killed him—we murdered him, really, in 2011. And the Saudis, for those years didn't—the Pakistanis did not tell us, because the first person they told that they—when they got him, through the ISI in '06, and put him in Abbottabad, they may—the first people they told were the Saudis. Why? Because the Saudis paid a lot of money to the two generals, and to others, perhaps, to keep it quiet, to keep it from us. They did not want us getting to bin Laden and talking to him. And I can tell you, since I've written that—I learned that from Americans—I've learned from ISI people that one of the ways they move money is they send tankers to us. They send—the Saudis would send tankers of oil to the Pakistanis for resale. You can reflag any ship on the ocean. It's an easy way to move money around. You can change ownership from Pakistani to Pakistani—from Saudi to Pakistani on the high sea.
AMY GOODMAN: Twenty seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: So, anyway, it's a story we didn't want to push too far publicly. But we actually—we were never supposed to announce the killing in Pakistan. They were supposed to take the body out, take it to the Hindu Kush mountains, and a day—a week or so later, announce that we killed him in a drone raid. And what the president did that night, because of political pressure, because of the worries about waiting a week—maybe somebody else would tell the story—he jumped ahead. It was re-election night. I guess any president would do that. But he did jump ahead. And he left Pasha and Kayani—
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: He left our two generals, the two generals in charge of the bombs, hanging. Not a good thing to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you for being with us. We'll continue this conversation, post it online at democracynow.org.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

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 DarkZero 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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