Atlantic Council Senior Adviser Harlan Ullman writes for The Daily Times on why Seymour Hersh’s account of the Osama Bin Laden raid is pure fantasy:
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.