By Mark Hensch<\/p>\n
A story published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.<\/p>\n
Author Seymour Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death.
\nThis decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president\u2019s version of events.<\/p>\n
\u201cHigh-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,\u201d Hersh wrote of the Obama administration\u2019s counterterrorism policies.<\/p>\n
Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a \u201cretired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden\u2019s presence in Abottabad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hersh\u2019s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden\u2019s compound.<\/p>\n
In addition, the source said 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cObama\u2019s speech was put together in a rush,\u201d Hersh wrote of Obama\u2019s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was not the fog of war,\u201d Hersh quoted his anonymous source as saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong \u2013 that wasn\u2019t even discussed,\u201d the source added.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly,\u201d the source said of Obama\u2019s advisers\u2019 response to his speech on the raid, Hersh wrote.<\/p>\n
Hersh\u2019s report also accuses the Obama administration of embellishing the details of the raid itself and presenting al Qaeda as a bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Hersh on Monday defended the report after a big blowback; critics have called the report thinly sourced and questions have been raised about inconsistencies within the piece.<\/p>\n
The White House, for example, on Monday panned the report.<\/p>\n
“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement shared with The Hill.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery sentence I was reading was wrong,\u201d former acting CIA Director Michael Morell added Monday on \u201cCBS This Morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he\u2019s talking about. The person obviously was not close to what happened,” he added. “The Pakistanis did not know. The president made a decision not to tell the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis were furious with us. The president sent me to Pakistan after the raids to start smoothing things over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Report: Obama lied about bin Laden raid By Mark Hensch A story published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden. Author Seymour Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to … Continue reading