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What do we really know about Osama Bin Laden's Death
NYT ^ | Oct 18, 2015 | Jonathan Mahler

Posted on 10/19/2015 8:37:11 PM PDT by robowombat

It’s not that the truth about bin Laden’s death is unknowable; 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Front Page News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: bhogwot; hersh; neptunespear; obl; obldead; sealteam6; specialops
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This is a long article and it is more than worth reading it. Other papers, the New Orleans T-P ran it in various degrees today. The T-P to its credit ran the entire article. If Hersh is significantly right it may explain why almost all the SEALs on the Bin Laden raid died in an air crash a few weeks later. Ten years ago i would dismiss it as just the dangers of the battlefield. After watching the regime for over six years anything seems to me to be probable as well as possible.
1 posted on 10/19/2015 8:37:11 PM PDT by robowombat
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To: robowombat

With THIS regime, I trust NOTHING.


2 posted on 10/19/2015 8:38:51 PM PDT by RandallFlagg (With the things that are about to come to light. People might just need a little old-fashioned.)
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To: robowombat

Can you synopsize for us ?


3 posted on 10/19/2015 8:40:56 PM PDT by knarf (I say things that are true ... I have no proof ... but they're true)
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To: knarf

Unknowable? Kenny Bunk had a pretty good idea.


4 posted on 10/19/2015 8:43:06 PM PDT by golux
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To: robowombat

A bit late for the media to start vetting Obama.


5 posted on 10/19/2015 8:43:08 PM PDT by Olog-hai
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To: knarf; All

‘The story stunk from Day 1,’’ Hersh told me. ......

Within days of the bin Laden raid, Hersh told me, ‘‘I knew there was a big story there.’’ He spent the next four years, on and off, trying to get it. What he wound up publishing, this May in The London Review of Books, was no incremental effort to poke a few holes in the administration’s story. It was a 10,000-word refutation of the entire official narrative, sourced largely to a retired U.S. senior intelligence official, with corroboration from two ‘‘longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command.’’ Hersh confidently walked readers through an alternate version of all the familiar plot points in a dispassionate, just-the-facts tone, turning a story of patient perseverance, careful planning and derring-do into one of luck (good and bad), damage control and opportunism.

Hersh, who is 78, was reluctant to cooperate when I told him that I was interested in writing about his article. .....He wanted me to follow up on his reporting instead and suggested that I might start by looking into Pakistan’s radar system, which he said was far too sophisticated to allow two U.S. helicopters to enter the country’s airspace undetected. (‘‘Those dimwitted third-world guys just can’t get anything right,’’ he wrote sarcastically, meaning of course the Pakistanis would have been aware of two military helicopters flying into the heart of their country.) Hersh, who worked at The New York Times for seven years in the 1970s, didn’t think the paper would allow me to take his claims seriously. ‘‘If you did so,’’ he wrote, ‘‘you better be sure not to let your wife start the car for the next few months.’’ But after a little prodding, he relented and spent the better part of a day with me, describing his reporting as thoroughly as he felt he could without compromising his sources.

.........
Hersh’s most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place. 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. For that matter, bin Laden was hardly ‘‘in hiding’’ at all; his compound in Abbottabad was actually a safe house, maintained by the Pakistani intelligence service. When the United States confronted Pakistani intelligence officials with this information, Hersh wrote, they eventually acknowledged it was true and even conceded to provide a DNA sample to prove it.

According to Hersh’s version, then, 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. Hersh’s sources told him the United States and Pakistani intelligence officials agreed that Obama would wait a week before announcing that bin Laden had been killed in a ‘‘drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.’’ But the president was forced to go public right away, because the crash and subsequent destruction of the Black Hawk — among the rare facts in the official story that Hersh does not dispute — were going to make it impossible to keep the operation under wraps.

As if those assertions weren’t significant enough, Hersh went on to make some even wilder claims. He wrote, for instance, that bin Laden had not been given a proper Islamic burial at sea; the SEALs threw his remains out of their helicopter. He claimed not just that the Pakistanis had seized bin Laden in 2006, but that Saudi Arabia had paid for his upkeep in the years that followed, and that the United States had instructed Pakistan to arrest an innocent man who was a sometime C.I.A. asset as the fall guy for the major in the Pakistani Army who had collected bin Laden’s DNA sample.


6 posted on 10/19/2015 8:44:21 PM PDT by robowombat
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To: robowombat

All I know is they should have taken him alive, sent him to Gitmo for proper waterboarding and thrown him off the Top of the new WTC Building into a Vat of Pig Blood the day the Building was finished.


7 posted on 10/19/2015 8:48:12 PM PDT by Kickass Conservative (THEY LIVE, and we're the only ones wearing the Sunglasses.)
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To: robowombat

Bookmark for later read. Looks interesting.


8 posted on 10/19/2015 8:52:40 PM PDT by jersey117
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To: Kickass Conservative
I never trusted the "story"...

all too pat....

throwing him in the ocean?....that made no sense...

and no one questioned it...

all of those Navy seals murdered IMO by somebody who didn't want them alive to tell their story....

I am more prone to say that Osama was killed during the Bush administration but they opted to keep it quiet so as not to rouse the muzzies...

9 posted on 10/19/2015 8:54:40 PM PDT by cherry
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To: robowombat

Do the Night Stalkers fly Spec Ops groups? How would they crash one of their birds with top-of-the-line avionics?


10 posted on 10/19/2015 8:58:23 PM PDT by wastedyears (Iron Maiden's new album is majestic.)
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To: RandallFlagg

Exactly.....


11 posted on 10/19/2015 8:58:52 PM PDT by Gator113 (~~Cruz, OR LOSE~~ Ted Cruz REMAINS the only true Conservative in this race. ~~ just livin' life~~)
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To: robowombat

Wait...SEYMOUR HERSCH..?

Isn’t he a huge, huge liberal...?


12 posted on 10/19/2015 9:04:12 PM PDT by gaijin
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To: robowombat

“He claimed not just that the Pakistanis had seized bin Laden in 2006, but that Saudi Arabia had paid for his upkeep in the years that followed.”

That is the connection that makes the whole Obama narrative on the bin Laden raid suspect and raises the question, why was bin Laden no longer of use to the White House and the Saudis?


13 posted on 10/19/2015 9:08:20 PM PDT by Timpanagos1
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To: robowombat

Geeeeeee .. where have people been.

We surely do know about bin laden. We have had interview after interview with the man who shot bin Laden. The man has stood at the WTC memorial and talked to people and shook people’s hands and hugged people who lost family in the WTC.

Where on God’s green earth have these people been hiding ..??


14 posted on 10/19/2015 9:16:13 PM PDT by CyberAnt ("The fields are white unto Harvest")
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To: The Final Harvest

So, just to clarify, what we know is what the man who is alleged to have killed him has said in interviews and what that same man has done publicly since that time.

That doesn’t sound to me like I actually know anything about Bin Laden’s death.


15 posted on 10/19/2015 9:19:43 PM PDT by chris37 (heartless)
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To: robowombat
You know why this is coming out now?
Because Biden is going to announce and Biden publicly outed (if that's the right word) Seal Team 6 as the group that got him.

The Biden apologists are coming out in force to squelch any bad $hit about Biden and his exposure of Seal Team 6.

I think some of the members have already been killed and maybe some family members too.

Trump should jump on this like stink on $hit and do it real soon before we are beat down with lies and distortions like we have been with Hillary.

I say Trump should do it because I think he's the only one with the balls to do it and he can be the most effective.

16 posted on 10/19/2015 9:20:31 PM PDT by lewislynn (Meghan Kelley...#sand--Rosie, the Don was right-- Hillary, lipstick on a pig)
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To: cherry

the muzzies are already aroused, whether ABL is dead or not - it’s all a sham to keep our country deeply entrenched in this unadulterated bullshit.


17 posted on 10/19/2015 9:24:27 PM PDT by Sioux-san
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To: chris37

Would it help if we drew you a picture ..??

It might be a little hard to look at .. seeing as how he shot him in the middle of his forehead (3 taps) .. a little messy maybe. But, he was buried at sea.

Why people can’t accept that .. is beyond me. I guess anything is possible .. and you seem to be saying that no matter what people say, you’ll never be convinced bin Laden is dead .. unless you see his dead body.

Good luck with that ..!!


18 posted on 10/19/2015 9:28:40 PM PDT by CyberAnt ("The fields are white unto Harvest")
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To: The Final Harvest

You believe what the government says?


19 posted on 10/19/2015 9:34:00 PM PDT by wastedyears (Iron Maiden's new album is majestic.)
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To: The Final Harvest

“Why people can’t accept that .. is beyond me. I guess anything is possible .. and you seem to be saying that no matter what people say, you’ll never be convinced bin Laden is dead .. unless you see his dead body.”

Of course not. Why would I believe anything said about this by anyone in this country?

I mean, seriously, why?

What would help is if you showed me pictures of his body or his actual body.

Otherwise, no, I don’t believe any of it, and what I do believe is that the American government and everyone in it lies about every single thing 100 % of the time.


20 posted on 10/19/2015 9:34:25 PM PDT by chris37 (heartless)
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