PRESS RELEASE
Seymour Hersh Article Screws Obama, Saudis on Bin Laden Murder
May 12, 2015 (EIRNS)—Yesterday’s press was filled with an all-out assault on Seymour Hersh by the Obama White House following Hersh’s publication in the London Review of Books of a 10,000- word piece declaring all the known versions of the death of Osama bin Laden to be a White House fabrication which might have been written by Lewis Carroll.
According to Hersh’s account, bin Laden had been captured by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI and since 2006 had been living in the Abbottabad ISI safehouse raided by our Navy Seals. The safehouse is next to a major ISI covert operations facility. A Pakistani source revealed this to the CIA in 2010 in return for millions of dollars in reward money offered for Bin Laden’s head. The Pakistanis were soon brought in on the fact that the U.S. knew where Bin Laden was and, based on generous U.S. offers of military and monetary assistance, decided to cooperate with U.S. plans.
According to the Hersh account: "A worrying factor at this early point was Saudi Arabia which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. The Saudis did not want bin Laden’s presence revealed to [the U.S.] The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money—lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden."
Based on these factors, according to Hersh, it was agreed that Osama bin Laden would be assassinated by the Navy Seals. In addition, as opposed to post-raid accounts, Bin Laden had been very ill and, at the point of his murder, was an invalid.
When Obama, for his own political re-election purposes, went public with his account of the raid (it had been originally agreed that it would be subsequently announced that bin Laden had been killed by a drone attack in Afghanistan), he blew apart careful cover stories and preparations by the cooperating intelligence agencies and forced a new level of lies and contradictory stories.
There is much more to the Hersh piece, which will be fully covered in the briefing tomorrow.
