Daily Times

The revelations, assertions and accusations made by Seymour Hersh in his London Review of Books piece on ‘The killing of Osama bin Laden’ are worthy of a Nobel Prize for fiction or, better yet, fantasy. For those who have neither read nor heard of this 10,000 word descent into wonderland, Hersh asserts that the raid that killed bin Laden four years ago was a set-up wonderfully play acted by President Barack Obama and his entire national security team from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA to Capitol Hill and the Pakistani army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who allegedly had been holding Osama prisoner as a means to control al Qaeda and the Taliban. What was that marvelous Hollywood tune with the key line that applies here, “You take my breath away”?
For a conspiracy driven nation like Pakistan, no doubt the Hersh narrative opened old wounds and provoked new ones. After all, that Osama was hiding barely a rifle shot away from the Pakistani equivalent of the US’s West Point in Abbottabad raised two profoundly and exquisitely contradictory conclusions. Either the Pakistani military and intelligence services were incompetent and did not know or Pakistan was complicit and had been sheltering bin Laden for years. Hersh clearly chooses the latter answer.
It is a pity that Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum are dead because the Hersh piece would have made for a great movie with either James Bond or Jason Bourne in the lead. Imagine M, the venerable head of the UK’s Secret Service, summoning Bond with the word that Osama was indeed alive and, to prevent a potential crisis between the US and Pakistan, Bond would have to kidnap or kill the architect of September 11. And who would have played bin Laden? One wonders.
It is hard to recall when such an over-the-top story was accorded this much attention and not immediately dismissed as absolute drivel. One needs to go back nearly 80 years when 23-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre Company broadcast H G Welles’ War of the Worlds and an invasion of earth by Mars. The radio broadcast was taken as real reporting. Over 1,000,000 US citizens believed the attack was taking place and, for a few minutes, the country was at panic stations. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed with the bin Laden saga. But, still, some suspended disbelief. After all, conspiracy theories are often fun. And why not stand truth and fact on their respective heads?
The most obvious antidote to such nonsensical but amusing prose is the absolute impossibility of the US government keeping such a ruse secret. Suppose Generals Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the Army Chief of Staff (COAS), and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the Director General (DG) of ISI were in league with their US counterparts Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs, and Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA. How many hundreds or thousands of others would have had to be in on this fabricated tale? It is inconceivable that someone higher up or lower in the chain of command did not blow the whistle or leak to the press. Indeed, an abundance of disclosures on the actual raid subsequently flooded the media.
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell wrote a devastating critique in last week’s Wall Street Journal destroying on a point-by-point factual basis Hersh’s tale. And if President Obama had one nightmarish scenario in mind, it was not that such a staged attack would be found out. Rather, Obama did not want to repeat a second Desert One raid that failed to free 54 US hostages taken prisoner in Tehran in 1979 when the US Embassy was overrun by Iranian ‘students’ and held captive for 444 days.
The larger question is: why is such a palpable fairytale being taken seriously? One can argue that Hersh’s journalistic coup in revealing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and subsequent scoops gave his reporting great credibility. Of course, continued distrust of the government plays to conspiracy reporting. And that bin Laden could have been hiding in plain sight for so many years in Abbottabad was very troubling.
All that withstanding, the facts are irrefutable. Hersh made news, bad news. And before believing such inventive and intriguing fiction, as Ronald Reagan famously said, “Trust but verify.” In this case, verification makes Hersh’s article a nominee for best fantasy of 2015.

The writer is chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business and senior advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council. His latest book, due out this fall, is A Handful of Bullets: How the Murder of an Archduke a Century Ago Still Menaces Peace Today