This is interesting. Pulitzer prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh claims the Bin Laden raid and execution was faked. He says Bin Laden had been dead for years, which is what many experts believed prior to the raid. Hersh is not your average journalist. He is the guy who uncovered and reported the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. He may be one of the last of a dying breed of real journalists.
Hersh makes the claim in a UK Guardian article titled Obama, NSA and the Pathetic American Media where he blasts American journalists for their failure to challenge the White House because they are afraid of becoming an unpopular messenger of truth. Actually, from what we have seen from the Obama administration, if journalists don’t play along with the White House story line, they are likely to find themselves banished from the official press conferences or investigated by the FBI.
Over the past couple of years it has not been unusual to learn more about what is going on with the Obama administration through UK journalists than through their American counterparts. News of NSA spy programs, excessive and expensive vacations taken by Michelle Obama, and other reports of strange occurrences are now more likely to be leaked from Europe than in the USA. Most USA journalists appear to be mesmerized or controlled to some degree by Obama in a manner that we have not seen for decades.
Getting back to the Bin Laden raid, Hersh does not cite his sources, but he is convinced he is right. There are indeed several aspects of the raid that are worthy of further investigation, but it would be next to impossible to do that today. All the evidence and some of the witnesses have been buried very deep. First and foremost is the fact that no proof of the assassination was presented. The few photographs of a dead Bin Laden that surfaced on the web were obvious fakes. The clam that Bin Laden was “buried at sea according to Islamic tradition” is also dubious. There is no Islamic tradition of burial at sea. Islam calls for a swift interment in the ground.
Then there is the breach of military protocol by announcements made by both Leon Panetta and Joe Biden that revealed the involvement of SEAL Team 6. Seal Team 6 is a clandestine group of senior Navy SEALS, whose identities and activities are never supposed to be revealed. The final cap on the issue was when most of the SEAL Team 6 members involved in the raid were killed in Afghanistan when their helicopter was shot down. There is strong evidence that the downing of the helicopter was a setup, either by the Afghan military leaking the information to the Taliban, or from other sources. Dead men tell no tales.
I heard stories from within the US military that two Navy SEALs died in the raid when one of the assault helicopters crashed inside the compound. But of course, that would not look good if that information was proven to be true.
From the perspective of Seymour Hersh, it should be the primary function of every journalist to question and investigate everything politicians tell us. They are obviously not doing that in the USA, but perhaps they should.