I read this article, and it's a great read. But my reaction was "even if this is true... so what?"
If they had used the lie to get support for "enhanced interrogations" (like people quoted in the article recommended), I'd be mad. If the US government had been holding bin Laden and waiting for the right time, I'd be mad, too. If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad.
But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us, and the changes were mainly to not implicate Pakistan or the informants. I wish we had a more transparent government, but hey, we flew into another country and murdered an elderly man... The story we got could have been worse. The gist seems to be true.
The claim is that Obama used it for political points, and he certainly did benefit. However the story he told was much closer to the truth than the story the CIA/people quoted wanted to tell. They wanted to say it happened via drone attacks. So, we're mad that Obama didn't lie enough?
The only "lie" from Obama was that it was a courier (rather than a deflector who probably has family in Pakistan), and that they were met with resistance (which would have implicated Pakistan and upset the Saudis/etc if the truth came out).
> If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad. But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us
Story A: The CIA does brilliant investigative work. The commander-in-chief makes a gutsy call. The SEALs storm in and kill the bad guy in a firefight. He is buried at sea with full rituals. The 2012 presidential campaign starts a few days afterwards.
Story B: Pakistan secretly captures Bin Laden by bribing tribesmen. The US finds out by bribing Pakistani officials. Further bribes with foreign aid money get other Pakistani officials to issue a stand down order. The SEALS swoop in unopposed but somehow still lose a helicopter. They kill a captive Bin Laden as part of a deal to avoid exposing Saudi support for Al Qaeda. The media gets fed a cover story about the compound being a command center. Some doctor guy becomes a scapegoat and vaccination programs are derailed in all of Pakistan. The CIA fabricates documents from the compound and flirts with claiming credit for "enhanced interrogation" technique in the matter.
Yup, totally the same story. And it played no part in Obama's re-election campaign, did it?!
yep, Story A is just the shining facade with nice sausages on the shelves and the Story B is the rest of the sausage factory. There is no contradiction between those 2 stories, they dovetail together as parts of the same thing.
1. The implication that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had him under their control since 2006 is important. We were still neck-deep in two wars that were sold to the public in large part based on Afghanistan's unwillingness to hand him over. If true, it also provides more explicit verification that SA and Pakistan are terrible allies at best.
2. Setting aside the morality of assassination, it suggests that the reason we killed him wasn't out of necessity or even expedience - but rather to prevent him from talking about these so-called allies.
3. Rather than implicating Pakistan and its corrupt ISI services, we implicated a humanitarian medical mission and its lead doctor. I fail to see that as the lesser of evils.
There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by this story if it turns out to be factual.
I think we are lucky that the top comment even mentions Saudi Arabia, towards the end, in passing. The degree to which the mainstream works at misdirection away from the reality of Saudi Arabia becomes more and more profound by the year.
>If true, it also provides more explicit verification that SA and Pakistan are terrible allies at best.
This was already the world's worst kept secret. Anybody with more than a passing involvement in A-stan knows the Pakistanis, in particular, were working both sides of the street.
Another comment points out that it's crazy to call Bin Laden "elderly." (I am older than that, and I am not elderly.) But by all accounts he was a key figure, once a leader, of an international terrorist network. Even if he did not have operational control of Al Qaeda at the moment he was killed, he was a legitimate target for a military attack.
Whoa, I didn't realize he was only 54 when he died. There's nothing about 54 that's elderly; I used that word because the article did, and I guess I assumed he was much older.
I think it matters because Zero Dark Thirty created the impression of heroic American intelligence operatives tracking down Bin Laden and engaging his body guards in a firefight. The reality is it was a mob style hit on an elderly man. We Americans have a tendency to glorify behavior that is in reality very ugly. This is a bad habit that leads to self-delusion.
Some other things, assuming for the sake of discussion that this writeup is accurate:
1. It damages the relationship of the jackboot community and the administration: the SEALs were deployed to hit Bin Laden, and were told that this would be done without fanfare. Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation. This is not how proper clandestine things are done, one imagines.
2. It damages the relationship of the jackboots in particular and the administration: having to suffer the indignity of signing what is a effectively an NDA for premeditated murder--and then watching two folks get away with breaching it because it supports the new, official story--cannot have been easy for the folks involved in the raid.
3. It damages the State department's credibility (hah) with Pakistan. We agreed that steps would be taken to reinforce the government's position with its people, and that we wouldn't implicate them--they would save face. Instead, we put up a flimsy half-baked cover story, and decide not to go with one that leads to lots of easy questions, which will never have answers that are either convenient or satisfying. Look how Gates reacted during the thing--was not happy.
4. It damages the relation of the government and its people. As seen through the FOIA requests, it's pretty obvious that several parts of the story don't really jive. So, it's obvious that there is either bad record keeping in place, or a coverup of some sort. Not in the dramatic sense, mind you, but just minor misalignments of documented reality with official story.
~
The problem isn't that they had the guy whacked--it's that they perhaps did such a thoroughly and unneeded job of lying about it afterwards.
If you want to see how this sort of thing should be done, look at the Israelis.
> Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation.
That's because the helicopter crash threw the old plans out the window. Once there's physical evidence of the Americans' raid, you've got to get ahead of the story. Obama simply had no choice.
Personally, I feel like this whole question is just one of many instances of information in the article that I find highly dubious.
This is Osama bin Laden. The US had been hunting him for years. There was no way that the president wasn't going to announce his death from the rooftops, and I have a hard time believing that any senior member of special ops thought otherwise. At those levels even the military officers are canny political operatives, they don't get their stars otherwise, and they would have known that this raid was going to be publicised.
So yeah, the fact that the White House was talking about this mission mere hours after its completion is a total non-surprise, and it would have been obvious to anyone involved that this would be the case, helicopter crash or not.
The State Department's credibility with Pakistan was dead the moment Panetta overruled (then-Ambassador Cameron) Munter and Hillary on the drone strikes (signature strikes as a name came later). You think Pasha was in DC visiting the State Department? The ISI was talking to DIA and CIA via Panetta and the American brass were dealing with the Pakistan brass.
Actually I grew up in my part of the country saying jive not jibe, never heard of the spelling with a "b" until recently. So yes for a lot of the US it's jive. Jive is a dance that pins on synchronicity, hence, I believe, the common (even if technically incorrect) application to comparison.
Reporting like this is so unconvincing because all the sources are anonymous and there is no way to corroborate the assertions of the reporter. It's as though he asking us to accept a story told by the Easter Bunny and confirmed by the Tooth Fairy. The explanation of why all the subterfuge is necessary is quite unconvincing. If you consider each of the reasons separately they make little sense. Given that the US SpecOps community is nearly completely Republican in its sympathies it makes no sense that this story would go unleaked by those elements. This version of the events also requires a vast conspiracy within the journalist community that has widely reported on the story from the perspective of numerous SEALs. Finally, what of all the injured SEALs on the crashed helo. No medevac, no casevac, no reportage. The US would definitely sacrifice a dozen lives to keep advanced stealth technology out of the hands of other governments. Fails Occam's Razor miserably.
Unfortunately, Sy Hersh has built a reputation for both breaking big stories but also getting big claims wrong. Personally, I find his description of his primary source a bit worrying: "(a retired senior intelligence official) ... (knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad) ... (privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid), and (to the various after-action reports)."
That's four assertions about his source, and none of them indicate that the source had any official role in the lead up to or the execution of the mission -- or, indeed, that he was even active in the IC at the time. That, plus the source's use of Vietnam-era terminology, suggests he could have started his career in the 1960s or very early 1970s, and thus could be at least five and as much as 10-15 years retired from the IC (assuming he had a full career at the Agency), and relying on contacts still active in the community for his information. The only statement that indicates the source had access to primary-source docs regards the SEALs' AARs, and even then it's impossible to be certain that Hersh's phrasing actually means that.
In this, Hersh is starting to remind me of many conservative writers who relied on similar source of often dubious quality -- Michael Ledeen's close connections with SISMI (now AISE) being one example, or the network of former CIA officers who whiled away the post-Stansfield Turner years running private intelligence shops and flowing questionable allegations to the National Review.
If Hersh is right -- and "right" in this case, given the explosive nature of his allegations, doesn't even mean in the ballpark, just playing the same game -- then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground. But extraordinary claims require &c., and the fact that Hersh had to publish this in the LRB rather than The New Yorker or WaPo (both regular outlets for many of his scoops) indicates that their editors were very uncomfortable with his sourcing as well.
I read the article, because it's at such variance with the official version. I have no idea how close to reality it is. My gut feeling is that your skepticism is justified.
would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground
Here we disagree. To put it crudely: NOBODY GIVES A FUCK!
Let's look at something IMO much more serious, Hillary's prowess at trading commodities.[1] She supposedly makes a cash deposit of under $1,000 into a trading account, and through a series of quite astute trades walks away with about $100,000 (about $323,000 in today's money) in about ten months, all as part-time activity.
As someone summarized it:
Only four explanations can account for
these remarkable results.
1) Blair may have been an exceptionally
good trader.
2) Hillary Clinton may have been
exceptionally lucky.
3) Blair may have been front-running
other orders.
4) Or Blair may have arranged to have a
broker fraudulently assign trades to
benefit Clinton's account.
Unless she was one of the greatest "amateur" commodities traders of all time, this was nothing more than a bribe to the Governor and First Lady of Arkansas.
But, like I said, NOBODY GIVES A FUCK. As Wikipedia put it: "There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing."
Nobody gives a fuck because there's no story. It was a long time ago and the combination of Blair being good and Clinton being lucky. They all made money, Clinton got out of the market before Blair, and then Blair went on to lose money.
the combination of Blair being good and Clinton being lucky
Did you read the Wiki? Someone did some calculations of the "luck" involved:
Using a model that was stated to give the
hypothetical investor the benefit of the doubt,
they concluded that the odds of such a return
happening were at best 1 in 31 trillion
> Then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground.
Few in the US are going to care either way. Osama is dead. How it happened doesn't really matter.
I don't know if his story is correct or not, but it does make more sense than any of the several, constantly-changing official versions we've been offered.
The man can't even grasp the differences between special forces and special operations. Sensitive comm gear most definitely would have been smoked, but not with concussion grenades.
So manyittle things wrong here that I can't give any credit to anything in this dumb article
Yes but 60 minutes put on Mark Owen/Matt Bissonette and his story cleared their fact check in which is quite rigorous. He talks openly about others killed in the compound, chopper crash etc. He has been quite vocal in criticizing some accounts that differ from his in minute ways. He did not clear his first book with the military and is still being investigated. Yes, I know the CIA gets paid to lie but nothing in the mainstream (vetted) media supports the LRB story.
You can actually see this much more clearly if you live in a non-English speaking country. The journalist community just doesn't seem to fact check very frequently. Many times I see stories being printed about things in Japan which are just wrong. Wire services like Reuters or AP print something and it seems to be taken as gospel. Then other news outlets like BBC seem to run the story without actually checking anything. Quite often it seems to be that the original story just had a bad translation. I've seen Reuters, especially, cock up quotes really badly to the point where a statement like, "We have no option but to continue this policy" would get translated to "We will not continue this policy". However, sometimes this gets blown up to almost fraud levels. A good example of this was a year or so after the big earthquake here I saw a report on BBC that several nuclear reactors were going to be restarted imminently, including the one a couple of km down the road from where I live. As I had seen exactly the opposite statement in the Japanese news, I was curious and rode my bike down to the power station and asked them myself. They told me that there was no way they would be restarting any time soon and that, just the opposite, there was talk of shutting it down permanently. After a few weeks, I saw news that the Japanese government was backing out of their plans to restart the power stations and that this was apparently a big scandal. Except that, of course, it wasn't. The power station was not going to restart. There were never any plans to do so. There was never any backing out and there was never any scandal. Somebody somewhere was obviously covering up for their cock up previously and nobody else bothered to check the sources (or was able to since they didn't speak Japanese). (Just in case anybody is wondering, they are now talking of restarting the power station and will almost certainly do so soon).
This kind of thing happens quite a bit more frequently than most people would imagine. Sometimes the error is quite serious. I imagine that it is practically trivial for governments to feed information to journalists and rely on their inability to check facts (for whatever reason). Based on my own experiences, I now personally don't rank the news very much higher in reliability than most other rumours. The more politically charged the topic, the less likely it is to be true, I think.
I find it hard to believe, in this version and the official version that Osama was killed and not taken alive. If I was Obama or director of CIA, I would have asked the boys to bring him in alive.
‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’
Islamic burials don't specify unceremoniously chucking people into the deep blue sea. Occam's Razor suggests that he was thrown into the ocean to prevent proper identification. Or, if it was really him, that he was killed and discarded to prevent interviews/investigations into his past associations.
The fact that the government would pretend to worry about "appropriate Islamic burials" stinks to high heaven.
He was probably too badly disfigured by having a few clips unloaded into his face, and the US didn't want any pictures leaking out.
The other justification for his at-sea burial, that I've read-that his grave would become a place of pilgrimage if his body were returned to Saudi Arabia is laughable on its face to anyone who knows the least bit about wahabbism.
Even if this article is completely true - so what? Even if he has found a 'smoking gun' to some double-switch operation by the CIA, and the public story isn't the whole truth, who cares? Job done.
The details simply don't hold any water though.
1) You don't destroy military hardened electronics systems with concussion grenades. All you'd do is scorch the paintwork.
2) The 'killed by a drone, confirmed by DNA evidence' supposed cover story is ludicrous. If he was killed by a drone high in the sky over the mountains, how on earth is the US supposed to have got a sample of his DNA?
3) The Saudi government would never fund Bin laden, as he was utterly opposed to the ruling family. Yes he was funded by Saudis, but not by the government. Outsiders frequently make this mistake, assuming that Saudi funding for Bin laden, and his family connections there, mean Saudi official support. That's a complete missunderstanding though and implies the author only has a pretty superficial grasp of the relationship.
4) The story that the SEALS were shooting in self defence is entirely necessary, otherwise they would be open to accusations of murder. They would know that and the idea that they would complain about it is ridiculous.
5) If only Bin Laden was killed, who did all the corpses locals found and photographed in the building belong to? Did the SEALs plant the AK-47s and Makarov pistol found at the compound? But if the SEALs were against the administration's re-packaging of the details of the raid and are as above-board as described in the article, why would they collude by planting fake evidence?
> The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance
Well, duh. The ISI officers and generals needed to be able to claim that and if the US people wanted their co-operation they needed to provide plausible deniability.
I am confused as to why this is presented as remotely surprising.
The biggest glaring fallacy with the CIA story I see is that the Pakistani's did not know about the presence of OBL in the country. The article mentions that the house was 2 miles from the military academy. Abbotabad is a garrison city, which means that there is quite literally armed forces present everywhere. I have been to Abbotabad, and there is no way that the Pakistanis would not have known about it. It is akin to saying that OBL was found a couple of miles from West Point and the Americans did not know.
I have been to Abbotabad too, and many other places right next to and within military bases in Pakistan, and it is pretty damn easy to live there undetected. No one is driving around checking houses. And even those who do, like meter checkers, are happy enough not to read your meter given say, 10 to 20 dollars worth of incentive.
Also Abbotabad is a real life city, not just some garrison town. And even if it was just a garrison town, it would still befull of un-armed non-military people. How do you think military people live in a garrison city? They aren't faceless storm troopers, many have families living right there. And many, many civilians providing services, from food to dry cleaning to road maintenance to flower delivery etc etc.
It is not about living undetected. Of course it is full of civilians, but the point being that due to current threats to ALL army bases and centres, there is always a check in place for security purposes. And with the notorious hand of the Pakistani intelligence almost everywhere, the narrative in the article seems highly likely.
I agree to this, I have been there too and we weren't even checked once during my few days there. We literally didn't see any armed forces most of the times. No check posts or anything exist. It's a very peaceful city.
I always chuckle at the "couple of miles from West Point" analogy, because West Point is in the middle of basically nowhere. One could easily live in the nearest town, a sleepy little town called Cornwall, without ever being noticed by the military if you didn't want to be.
> By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.
'faced with an unarmed elderly civilian'.
I know it's only a quote from 'an offical', but Osama was 54 when he was killed. Ill possible. But hardly 'elderly'.
The author selected that quote, like all the rest, to make a point. It's little slip ups like that that let you judge someone's biases in an objective way. No fair reporter would imply Osama Bin Laden was ever 1. unarmed 2. elderly 3. a civilian. It's a deeply wrong and misleading quote, intended to bias the reader in favor of the author's narrative. If these guys would order a hit on a a little old innocent grandpa, what wouldn't they do?
The article's theory is built on a house of cards, like a most conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Even 'civilian' in that context is misleading. Technically true, but misleading, as it's trying to play up the innocence of the person.
A drug cartel kingpin is technically a "civilian", as is the head of a global terrorism network, as is the head of a human trafficking network. None of them are members of a recognized country's militia, but they still command significant force.
"High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy"
Is there a person alive that doesn't know this? The same can be said of any powerful nation's policy throughout most if not all of history. Ending the story on such a truism as if it's an exposure is lame.
I don't want to be nitpicking conspiracy dude, but one thing seems wrong. The article mentions several times that the electricity to the town was cut for the raid. But it was widely reported that someone live-tweeted the raid as it was happening (without knowing what was going on), which shows the power must have been on. http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/live-tweet-bin-laden-raid/
Yes, you are right. Even then, GPRS still works better here than some areas of SF. Also, since each home has their own UPS backup. WIfi would still be working since phone lines were working (DSL via phone line is common here).
In short: tweeting would definitely not have been that trivial.
This is the interview he refers to with Durrani in February (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UeWkBYfJBM); I remain as unconvinced now as I was by Carlotta Gall's clearly one-source one-note story or the unconvincing psychological analysis of the Pakistan army from this 'retired source', (why couldn't he just go try to wangle an interview with the informant?) His contention that the Americans were running Jundullah in Balochistan was eventually made out to be unfounded. This is plausible but unfounded, it doesn't ring fully true just yet.
I am reminded that (i) there is, as far as I know, no independent corroboration of the purported killing of Osama Bin Laden, and (ii) it was politically a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.
If he was still alive then he or his allies wasted a wonderful opportunity to discredit the US. I don't think they're that dumb.
It's like one of the arguments against faked moon landings. The Soviets would have been highly motivated to disprove the events, and had the skills and resources to do so if they had been fake, yet they didn't.
I think it's unlikely that he's still walking around :) However, it is possible that he died or was captured some time before he was allegedly killed. I think that we are unlikely to see any independent evidence either way.
Again, this was a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.
> Again, this was a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.
as jfb mentioned, this isn't an argument. you're thinking that it's a "motive," except that it's a motive to a crime you haven't provided any evidence for. you're skipping the only step that matters. nevermind that if there was any question, republicans would have made endless mountains of pop corn out of it like they have with the attack on the consulate in Libya.
So was the unemployment rate falling. What's your point?
In all fairness, perhaps this wasn't the best example. The official unemployment rate (U3) isn't the most reliable thing: not only can it be revised in subsequent months, but individuals who no longer qualify for unemployment insurance (but are still looking for work) are no longer counted as "unemployed".
The U6 number is slightly more reliable, but is seldom reported as it is not as politically convenient.
"Trust me, this great thing happened which is going to increase my popularity. There's no to verify that this great thing actually happened, but you know that I wouldn't lie to you."
Given how embarrassing it was to the Pakistani government, wouldn't the fact that they never disputed its occurrence lend great weight to the official story? Unless the theory is that the raid happened but just didn't result in killing the guy, which seems pretty weird.
At its peak in 2010, the US gave Pakistan 4.5 billion dollars in aid [1] (although in more recent years this value has decreased). That sort of money can buy a lot of cooperation.
Isn't it pretty likely that Pakistan, or more specifically the ISI, used some of that money to fund the Taliban? Sandy Gall mention this in his book "War Against the Taliban" - here is a review:
Al Qaeda confirmed his death, his daughter witnessed the attack and his death, photos of his corpse were shown to various members of Congress, etc. Assuming this was all a hoax would require a conspiracy of moon-landing proportions.
I remember where I was when the towers fell (working at home that day in s.f.). I remember where I was when Reagan was shot (playing mini golf in junior high).
I don't remember where I was when Osama bin laden was killed. It just felt like such an inevitability and correction to history that it should have happened already. Remembering what I was doing was pointless.
Also, everything before was such a waste. We wasted so many lives in Iraq when the real enemies were the Pakistani intelligence service and Saudi Arabia. I just wanted to forget it all.
I remember where I was when bin Laden died; watching idiots prancing down D.P. and Pardall Road in Isla Vista waving American flags and honking horns, with my jaw dropped stood on the sidewalk.
Defining an "enemy of the Republic" really is just a rhetorical technique to assert what the goals and values of the Republic are. Sometimes it is one that the residents of the republic broadly agree with because they share those values and goals either explicitly ("I want myself and my kin to avoid getting killed in a building collapse") or implicitly ("I'm totally fine with a credit-based economy, though I wish it worked out better for my group.")
Occasionally it is a rhetorical technique with powder and steel behind it.
Anyways, the point intended was that, while there are transient enemies of The American Dream (however one may wish to define it within reason, but including the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and general zeitgeist of 20th century America), they tend to go up in flames with their victims.
The true enemies, though, see that by either exploiting or altering the processes of government and manipulating popular opinion, and they tend to integrate themselves with the host and extract as much value as they can. They are also more likely to stay around, having become part of the system. It's unfortunate.
I desperately want this to be true just because I'm a political junkie and a student of history and it'd be a great start to the week to see the White House, State department, Pakistan, and everyone else respond to it. Definitely rooting for a Charlie Rose interview of Hersh. But there does seem to be only one main source he relies on and the whole story and its details just seem so perfect.
It will be interesting to see if his story is corroborated in the weeks and months to come.
- ISI bribed tribal folks in Hindu Kush region to turn over Bin Laden sometime during 2001-2006.
- From 2006 onwards senior elements within the ISI kept Bin Laden hidden from the world.
-ISI was essentially playing a double game, telling americans they knew nothing about Bin Laden's whereabouts and receiving boat loads of weapons and cash to deal with terrorism; while telling the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda they would keep Bin Laden safe from the Americans as long as they didn't cross any boundaries set by the ISI. Saudi's helped the ISI with Bin Laden's welfare and well being apparently.
-Americans didn't sherlock holmes Bin Laden's hideout but a leaker from the ISI had come to the American's and asked for the 25 million dollar reward and safety of his family in exchange for Bin Laden.
-Bin Laden living in Abbottabad was under constant monitoring by ISI living in a de facto prison. He was not running any command center but living out his last few years while health deteriorating.
- Obama wanted proof before sending Seals a senior ISI medical officer was living in Abbottabad and got that proof.He was given a portion of the reward.
- White House tells Pasha and Kayani( heads of Army and ISI) they are monitoring a high value target in Abbotabad. Pasha and Kayani freak out and cooperate because if Pakistani Public, Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda find that ISI and Pak Army gave Bin Laden away to the Americans all hell would break loose. So the narrative of the "All American" no help from anyone had to be constructed, because how would it look if the American people found out the Pakistan Army and ISI was hiding Bin Laden 2 miles from a major Pak Army training facility.
- Pasha and Kayani make sure the two BlackHawks are not intercepted by Pakistani Airforce no radar goes off, and the ISI agents guarding the house are not present when the Seal team comes in.
-Unarmed Bin Laden is executed, no firefight ensued as the compound was empty( only Bin Laden and his family) the Seals chill for 20 minutes waiting for some other helicopter to come because one of the helicopters really did crash . If this where real the Seals would have all gotten in 1 helicopter and gotten the hell out, but there was no threat.
-Obama really wanted to brag so instead of planning a story, he immediately got a speech prepared(lots of discrepancies in his speech that night he thanks the pakistani's in their continued support to fighting terrorism). CIA and senior Army people freak out he wasn't even supposed to mention the pakistanis, lots of backtracking and revisions of the story come in the days that follow.
Looks like they say there was no firefight, but I remember there was a guy from Bay area, Pakistani techie in Abottabad that night and he live tweeted the gun fight and explosions before any news came out. Wonder how that would fit this new narrative?
OBL's not dead. He mostly hangs out in the break room at Langley. HW Bush, prince Bandar, and some other guys from congress stop by and they all reminisce about the good old days.
I was at a bus stop, in my college town. I was watching Twitter, because the press conference had been called but nobody knew for sure what it was. I started seeing tweets that the announcement was going to be about bin Laden being killed, then, all at once, I heard cheering coming from apartment windows all up and down the street. Totally surreal.
I might've had a different experience than many folks older (or younger) than I, though -- I was 10 when the attacks happened, and for a lot of the kids my age, OBL was the first real-life boogieman we knew. Then, just as we became old enough to really get immersed in current events, he was killed.
Same here. I couldn't even tell you what year it was without looking it up. As another poster said, it was anticipated for so long that it didn't seem significant when it finally happened.
I was in Darby phase of Ranger School, and when the instructors told us, because it didn't have to do with getting a few more minutes sleep or calories, I really didn't care. However, when I graduated it was one of the first things I looked up.
If they had used the lie to get support for "enhanced interrogations" (like people quoted in the article recommended), I'd be mad. If the US government had been holding bin Laden and waiting for the right time, I'd be mad, too. If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad.
But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us, and the changes were mainly to not implicate Pakistan or the informants. I wish we had a more transparent government, but hey, we flew into another country and murdered an elderly man... The story we got could have been worse. The gist seems to be true.
The claim is that Obama used it for political points, and he certainly did benefit. However the story he told was much closer to the truth than the story the CIA/people quoted wanted to tell. They wanted to say it happened via drone attacks. So, we're mad that Obama didn't lie enough?
The only "lie" from Obama was that it was a courier (rather than a deflector who probably has family in Pakistan), and that they were met with resistance (which would have implicated Pakistan and upset the Saudis/etc if the truth came out).
(Note that similar stories came out after we captured Saddam Hussein, saying that he wasn't found in a hole: http://nation.com.pk/international/14-Apr-2015/saddam-was-no...)