Report Claims Obama Lied About How Osama bin Laden Was Killed

The US government’s “official” narrative of how Osama bin Laden was killed has been hotly contested by many, including Pakistani TV reports, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.

And it is Hersh who has now come forward with a scathing report that accuses Obama of deceiving Americans about the death of the al Qaeda leader.

Back in September 2013, during an interview with The Guardian, Hersh said that the 2011 raid that resulted in the death of bin Laden was “one big lie, not one word of it is true.” He made the claim that the Obama administration lies systematically, and that American media outlets are reluctant to challenge the administration, saying, “It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].”

Hersh, who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist,” has never been one to fear exposing the truth.

In his new report, titled The Killing of Osama bin Laden and published in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death.

This decision, Hersh argues, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

“Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.

“This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,” he added.

“This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.

“The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed,” the source added.

“And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly,” the source said of Obama’s advisers’ response to his speech on the raid, Hersh wrote. (source)

Hersh cites an anonymous intelligence official who he claims was “knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.” He also gathered information from sources inside Pakistan, two consultants to Special Ops Command and Navy SEALs.

He also alleges that Pakistan had been holding bin Laden prisoner in the compound since 2006 and that the White House was told about his location by a Pakistani intelligence officer hoping to collect the $25 million bounty, which casts doubt on the claim that the US gained that information by interrogating an al Qaeda follower.

Hersh’s source claimed that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.

In addition, the source alleged that the Obama administration originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission.

The report also claims there was no dramatic SEAL team firefight involved in bin Laden’s killing: the only shots fired were those that killed bin Laden, whom Hersh described as a “feeble, unarmed man.”

Hersh further alleges that after he was killed, bin Laden was not buried at sea, but in Afghanistan.

His report also accuses the Obama administration of presenting al Qaeda as a bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden’s death.

In December, we reported on the mysterious death of former Fox News correspondent Dominic Di-Natale, who reported from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in the aftermath of the US raid. Di-Natale was known for chiseling out a brick from the compound. We speculated that he may have known too much: he reportedly died the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee’s controversial CIA torture report was released. That report revealed that torture of detainees did not aid in the finding and killing of bin Laden.

Naturally, the White House is dismissing Hersh’s report as “baseless” and “filled with inaccuracies.”