Seymour Hersh and the Bin Laden Raid

Four days ago Seymour Hersh published an article an article questioning the official story on the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. Here’s the story. And a rebuttal, from government officials. And a deconstruction of the rebuttal and a defense of the original story.

I can’t really comment on the substance of Hersh’s allegations, because there’s absolutely no evidence to support or refute them. Actually, the intriguing thing about the Bin Laden raid is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the official story either, which makes it a very convenient target for both investigative journalism and conspiracy theories, whichever this turns out to be.

I do find it funny that the rebuttal includes the statement “If you believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Mike Morell were all lying to you.” It’s brings me no end of amusement to think that this official, a former CIA spokesman, is befuddled by the very concept of lying coming from politicians and spies. Isn’t that what they’re for?

There is one section of Hersh’s account that I’d like to examine more, though. The official story is that the CIA was watching Bin Laden’s courier, got suspicious, and used a fake vaccine program to confirm their suspicions. Hersh’s story is that the CIA was approached by a high-level ISI official and confirmed the report using undisclosed means. The vaccine doctor was given up as a scapegoat because he was already an ISI prisoner for other reasons, and it wouldn’t affect him much.

So my question is why give up the doctor at all? Whether it was releasing a true detail or inventing a false detail, it wasn’t at all necessary. And it has had catastrophic consequences. Vaccination teams have been torn apart by angry mobs. Polio is back, leaving hundreds of children dead or injured. Would it have been so hard to simply not release that detail? Easy enough to simply say there was a DNA test postmortem instead of premortem.

I look forward to finding out more about this in the future. Hersh has a habit of writing things that turn out to be true once they are declassified decades later. With any luck I’m still alive when the truth of this tale gets out.