1.
Goodman:
Four years ago this month, President Obama announced U.S. forces had killed
Osama bin Laden in a raid on his hideout in Pakistan.
2.
Obama:
At my direction, the United States has 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.
3.
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 the CIA. 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.
4.
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.
5.
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 is
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.
6.
Goodman:
In a statement, White House National Security spokesperson Ned Price said, “There
are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check
each one... the notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden 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?
7.
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.
8.
Maté:
Can we talk about what seems to be the most shocking claim. Pakistan finding 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.
9.
Hersh:
Where do you get the notion of hundred or thousand officials? It’s, it’s — 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, ten years ago through a WMD
sort of cover up. The notion that there is 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 the
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 to
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, two hundred, maybe
more, they’re still making — producing enriched uranium, etc., etc. And they
have a great deal of nuclear weapons. I would guess they’re up to 200 now. It
was 100 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, and very closely to watch
out — literally with them — to monitor the people who are in control of the
weapons that make sure nobody is a secret nationalist or a secret jihadist who
might grab weapon and do something crazy with it. That’s a serious — big issue
that’s sort of an 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 it’s own agenda. And so, ‘06, they did grab bin
Laden. 2010 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 — 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 a desert, you know, in
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 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,
Interservices Intelligence Unit; their 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 — 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 and senators say — 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 and 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 that 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. The SEALs are
basically better off with 8-10 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 the 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 a man that a lot of people
would want to get to. They’re going in just repelling down was the plan. You
know, a perfect target 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 at Abbottabad,
sort of a resort town, and a resort town 48 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
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
not 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 ten 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, the
Waziristan — that’s not clear, it was going to be vague as to whether it — 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, eight percent — that’s the
popularity of America in Pakistan, was eight percent — bin Laden was hugely
popular. If it was known to the public that Pasha and Kayani, the two leading
generals that 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 is 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.
10.
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?
11.
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 into 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 issue accounts, 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 in tact. Any way. And
by the way, if you think about the sequence that 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, the 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 nine o’ clock, I
think it was CNN or somebody began to report at, on the night that the
raid was announced, the night of the raid, after it’s 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 ten 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, 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 — 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 — bin Laden was killed in it. That’s to cover the idea that it’s an
out and out murder. And he said also, in the fight, he said also 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 is you don’t do that. And so we had to protect that -—
12.
Goodman:
You mean the guy who revealed to the U.S. — walking into the U.S Embassy.
13.
Hersh:
Yeah, they call him a walk in. And the President actually said in his speech,
we had a lead — he said in Aug — 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 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 they — 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 — ,” no what was it —
14.
Goodman:
“Zero Dark Thirty”?
15.
Hersh:
Zero Dark — Zero Dark — that was the thesis of the movie. It also included the
torture element. Absolutely not so. What happened is we had a guy walk in. NBC
—- NBC, last night about six o’ clock, 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 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 —
16.
Goodman:
Sy — go ahead.
17.
Hersh:
— it’s not — 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 a 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 — there
was no killing of people in the court yard. If there had been a gun in the
court yard, if anybody’d had a gun in the court yard it was cleared by the
intelligence — 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.
18.
Goodman:
Sy, we have to break, but we’re going to come back to this discussion.
19.
Hersh:
Sure.
20.
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,” appears It tells a very different story than
the one we were told in the United States by President Obama. Stay with us. [break] 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 piece in the London 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.
21.
Maté:
This morning on CNN, Philip Mudd, CNN ‘s counter terrorism analyst discussed
Sy Hersh’s reporting.
22.
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-Qaida, there were also, at the same time, secretly sheltering the head of
al-Qaida. 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.
23.
Maté:
That’s Philip Mudd of CNN. Sy Hersh, do you want to respond to that?
Darth Vader in the White House.
24.
Hersh:
No, of course not. I don’t care.
25.
Maté:
OK, let me ask —
26.
Hersh:
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. The — I write about them very carefully.
One of the questions always asked is, why did you do this to us? And
particular, why bring in the Saudis. What happened is the Pakistanis, as some
of you may know are very close with 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 was, 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 the
Saudi Arabia wants is the United States to be — the begin interrogating Osama
bin Laden and discover who might have been giving him money, which sheikh,
where, in Saudi Arabia in 2001 and 2002, 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 only the same as ours. So we accepted it. We had not much choice, we
wanted their help. But — so it’s not a case 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 triggering a whole sequence of lies that had to be —
a whole story that 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 — to 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 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 certainly prevalent in Africa. And
we’ve had tremendously adverse consequences for the health of -—
27.
Goodman:
Sy, we have ten seconds.
28.
Hersh:
Well the implications for the health, the 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.
29.
Goodman:
Seymour Hersh, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative journalist in Washington, D.C. We’ll link to your piece in the London
Review of Books called “The
Killing of Osama bin Laden.” Coming up, CIA whistle-blower, Jeffrey
Sterling is sentenced to three and a half years in jail. We’ll air an exclusive
interview with him. This marks the first time the public has heard his voice
since he was arrested four years ago. Stay with us.
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