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form.
AMY
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.
PRES.
BARACK OBAMA:
At my direction, the United States has launched a targeted operation
against that compound in Abadibad, 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.
AARON
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
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 Abadibad but make it
look as if Pakistan was unaware. In fact, Hersh says top Pakistani military
leaders provided key help.
AMY
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.
JOSH
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
Morrell has said that every sentence was wrong. And Jim, I actually
thought one of your colleagues at CNN
put it best, Peter Bergan, 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.
AMY
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 the 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, who’s 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 and 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.
SEYMOUR
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.
AARON
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.
SEYMOUR
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, Baum [sp], 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, Pakistani 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 Abadibad 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; they’re 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 Bergan — 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 Gordan in The New
York Times at the height of the WMD crisis
about the tubes that allegedly could be use 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 Gaza, Gaza 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
Abadibad 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 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 Abadibad, 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 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.
AMY
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?