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American history is filled with war stories that subsequently unraveled. Consider the Bush administration's false claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction or the imagined attack on a U.S. vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin. Now Johnathan Mahler writes in the NY Times about the inconsistencies in the official US story about bin Laden's death. "Almost immediately, the administration had to correct some of the most significant details of the raid," writes Mahler. Bin Laden had not been ''engaged in a firefight,'' as the deputy national-security adviser, John Brennan, initially told reporters; he'd been unarmed. Nor had he used one of his wives as a human shield. The president and his senior advisers hadn't been watching a ''live feed'' of the raid in the Situation Room; the operation had not been captured on helmet-cams.
But according to Mahler there is the sheer improbability of the story itself, which asked us to believe that Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal mission, invading Pakistani air space without air or ground cover, fast-roping into a compound that, if it even contained bin Laden, by all rights should have been heavily guarded. How likely was that? Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the conspicuously large bin Laden compound — three stories, encircled by an 18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire — was less than two miles from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point. ''The story stunk from Day 1,'' says Seymour Hersh whose most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place. According to Hersh, it was not years of painstaking intelligence-gathering, he wrote, that led the United States to the courier and, ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the location was revealed by a ''walk-in'' — a retired Pakistani intelligence officer who was after the $25 million reward that the United States had promised anyone who helped locate him. And according to Hersh, the daring raid wasn't especially daring. The Pakistanis allowed the U.S. helicopters into their airspace and cleared out the guards at the compound before the SEALs arrived. The most blatant lie was that Pakistan's two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission.
"It's not that the truth about bin Laden's death is unknowable," concludes Mahler. "it's that we don't know it. And we can't necessarily console ourselves with the hope that we will have more answers any time soon; to this day, the final volume of the C.I.A.'s official history of the Bay of Pigs remains classified. We don't know what happened more than a half-century ago, much less in 2011."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday October 23 2015, @02:09PM
Actually, none of that was what really jumped out at me.
According to the official story, they captured OBL alive, then killed him and dumped him in the Indian Ocean. But that's a dumb move if your primary goal is fighting terrorism - if your goal is fighting terrorism, your next step is to lock him up and send in one of your best interrogators to learn about everything he was coordinating, who he was coordinating it with, and as much about their specific plans as possible. Whereas if you kill him immediately, you lose access to all the information he had about Al Qaida and its activities. So based on that, why kill him?
But I don't think that leads to the conclusion that he's still alive secretly somewhere. Instead, it leads to the conclusion that he's dead not because of anything to do with terrorism but because of something that he knew that he wasn't supposed to know. That something probably had something to do with his relationship with the CIA that was established back in the 1980's. Indeed, it might have been what turned him from a CIA asset fighting the Russians into a terrorist fighting the US. I also don't think he's the only person from a faraway country that has been declared a terrorist leader for that very reason. And whatever it is, it's something the CIA definitely does not want the US public to know - my guess is past actions by CIA personnel that would land them at the International Criminal Court at the Hague if anybody had definitive evidence.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.