New York Times Magazine Resurrects Hersh Exposé of Bin Laden Hoax

The New York Times Magazine Sunday featured an extensive article by Jonathan Mahler, resurrecting Seymour Hersh’s May 2015 expose of how the Obama Administration lied about the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  Mahler conducted extensive interviews with Hersh and cross-checked his account with a number of sources in the United States and Pakistan.  While he did not directly corroborate Hersh’s account, his own research added to the evidence that the Obama White House and the CIA fabricated an account that played an important role in Obama’s 2012 re-election, and that Hersh’s own investigation had been thoroughly fact-checked by the publishers at the London Review of Books, including direct interviews with some of Hersh’s most important confidential informants.

In his original May 2015 account, Hersh charged that a Pakistani military officer had “walked in” to the CIA with details on Bin Laden’s whereabouts, in return for the $25 million reward and placement in the Federal Witness Protection Program, thus debunking the Obama and CIA claims that Bin Laden had been found by an elaborate intelligence gathering process that showed how effective the U.S. intelligence system was.

Hersh furthermore proved that the Pakistani authorities had been in on the raid to kill Bin Laden from the outset, and a fabricated story had been worked out with U.S. officials to conceal their role (the story that the crash landing of one of the two Black Hawk helicopters used by Navy SEALs in the raid prompted Obama to double-cross the Pakistanis and reveal Bin Laden’s death within hours of the assault).  For years, Saudi Arabia had been paying Pakistan to keep Bin Laden in safe, protective custody in a safehouse compound in Abbottabad.  By pre-arrangement with the U.S., Pakistani military and ISI guards, protecting Bin Laden, were withdrawn from the compound just before the American helicopters landed.

The New York Times Magazine story reiterated the special role that then-White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan had played in putting out the hoax account.

No American publication would touch the Hersh story when he first wrote it, including New Yorker Magazine, where Hersh had been writing since the 1970s.  The fact that the New York Times Magazine published the in-depth story Sunday, regardless of the fact that the author did not 100 percent corroborate the Hersh account, is another blow to Obama’s image.  Coming just days after the release of the Drone Papers, documenting his personal role as a mass murderer on a global scale, the New York Times Magazine account adds to the growing picture of President Obama as a killer and a liar who should be immediately removed from office.