The 10,000-word essay by Seymour Hersh in London Review of Books (published on Sunday May 9) has put a new spin on what we know thus far about the killing of Osama bin Laden. It has two central themes. One Pakistan under General Musharraf systematically lied to the world even when Osama bin Laden was an honoured guest of the ISI at Abbottabad. Two the Obama administration also had lied about the raid by US Navy Seals that killed bin Laden on May 1, 2011. Reports by media outlets like NBC have since lent credence to Hersh expose.
NBC News reported, citing three unnamed sources, two of them in US intelligence, that a “walk in” from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where Osama bin Laden was hiding a year before the US raid. It also said that the Pakistani government knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad, a headquarters town for the Pakistani military.
Several Pakistani news outlets have identified former brigadier Usman Khalid of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as the official who had actually tipped off the CIA about bin Laden; he since been moved to the United States and is working with the CIA. Pak Media also identified one intelligence official, Ijaz Shah, as the man who arranged to house bin Laden in Abbottabad, at the direction of then-president Pervez Musharraf. Put simply this is the confirmation if still some confirmation is required that Pakistani officials at the highest level were aware of bin Laden’s presence in their midst.
Many of the key allegations made by Hersh—the Pakistanis holding bin Laden, the Saudis paying the expenses, the “walk in” providing bin Laden’s location to the CIA, the Pakistani cooperation with the raid by the Navy Seals, the US plan to claim bin Laden had been killed by a drone-fired missile—were previously made by R. J. Hillhouse, a US college professor and blogger on national security issues, in several postings during August 2011.
Hillhouse now says that Hersh’s story “has been spot on,” but that she had different sources within the military-intelligence apparatus.
—POREG DESK
