Osama Hunt: Obama Version Countered by Hersh Expose

Pulitzer-prize winning author and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has of late caused uproar with his take on the Osama killing in the London Review of Books, questioning the US claims of the incident as a protracted military feat of the state and, thereby, ruffling the feathers of the American military intelligence establishment as well as its propaganda machines. The article claimed that senior Pakistani army generals and top ISI officials had kept Osama Bin laden in a hiding place in Pakistan from 2006 before selling him to the US government in 2011. A noted figure for exposing US war crimes in Vietnam, Hersh also said that Pakistan’s then top generals, army chief Parvez Ashfaq kayani and intelligence head Ahmed Shuja Pasha were intimidated by the US officials to co-operate with them for playing a hunt-drama as planned by the later. He also revealed that Obama had a master-plan for gaining political ends, including a second term in re-election.

According to Hersh, who has penned a long peice about the ‘hunt’, a senior Pakistani intelligence officer had offered Bin Laden’s location to the CIA station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad, Jonathan Banks, in return for recompense. He also claimed that the ISI initially held Bin Laden, who then had lived from 2001 to 2006 with his wives and children in the Hindu Kush Mountains. The article also said that Saudi Government had known about Pakistan’s protective custody of Bin Laden and that they helped Pakistan in keeping him with them.

Though US held that a vaccination programme was used to collect DNA samples, Hersh countered it by saying that it was all made up as part of an elaborate cover-up. According to him, ISI cut power to the neighbourhood where Osama was hiding on the day of the raid and made sure Pak forces would not intervene with the US choppers flying into sovereign airspace. While US said earlier that Osama was killed in a fireflight, for Hersh, there was no fireflight during the raid, the only shots fired were those that killed an unarmed Osama. His account also negated the US claim of burying Osama at sea and revealed that some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush Mountains by US navy SEALs during their helicopter flight back to Jalalabad. He disclaimed Obama’s announcement of the raid and said that Obama had agreed with Pak to keep the action secret for seven days.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has dismissed Hersh’s controversial report on Monday as ”baseless”. White House National Security spokesman Ned Price told CNN that there were too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in the report to fact check each of them. Former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell said angrily in an interview that he started reading the article and that he got a third of the way and he stopped, because every sentence he was reading was wrong.

in what seems to be a shoking wave to the White House, Hersh has announced that an unnamed and retired senior US intelligence official and other sources have helped him unravel the mystery behind Osama hunt. Despite the dismissal of Hersh’s claims by the Government officials and critics indicating his style of journalism quoting incognito sources, the editors of his past works have told that there was no reason to doubt the credibility of his sources. Hersh has told TImes of India in an interview that London Review of Books have already fact-checked his report and contented with it.