It is hard to overstate the extent to which the killing of Osama bin Laden transformed American politics. It enabled Barack Obama to recast himself as a bold leader, helped cement his 2012 re-election victory and gave him the cover he needed to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, while the apparent intelligence triumph redeemed the sullied reputation of the CIA. But the story of what really happened on May 2, 2011 when the massive international hunt for world’s most wanted terrorist finally reached a bloody climax remains caught between competing and very different narratives — that of the Obama administration and that of the skeptics, led by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
I was heartened to hear that Jonathan Mahler had been assigned to write a story for The New York Times Magazine about the narratives. It seemed that Mahler might shed enough new light to answer the question of which narrative was correct, or at least more correct given the complex web of events leading up to and following the Navy Seal raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan, but the 7,500-word result of his labors published on October 15 — “What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?” — disappoints.
Perhaps it was bound to do so. After all, Mahler is a media maven and not an investigative reporter, but it is striking that no one with whom he spoke budged about how they viewed the fascinating but frustrating exposé by Hersh.
“The Killing of Osama bin Laden” a takeout published in the London Review of Books on May 21, peeled away layers of back-channel diplomatic intrigue only hinted at in official pronouncements and news accounts on the takedown of bin Laden. Hersh provided a fascinating big-picture perspective filled with gritty detail, but he frustrated because while some of his conclusions in making the argument that “the White House’s story [about bin Laden] might have been written by Lewis Carroll” have the ring of truth, others seem far-fetched.
The White House dismissed Hersh’s story as “baseless,” specifically his assertion that the administration collaborated with Pakistani officials. “The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false,” National Security spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
The much-lauded Hersh is the finest and one of the most prolific investigative reporters of modern times, so anything under his byline is worth taking seriously and this investigation certainly is. Criticism of his heavy reliance on anonymous sources over the years has seemed like so many sour grapes to this observer. That so noted, to its detriment the bin Laden story is very thinly sourced with Hersh’s big and repeatedly cited go-to guy an unnamed but very well-connected “retired senior intelligence official” on which, it seems to me, he relies far too much with too little corroboration.
Mahler correctly notes in his Times Magazine takeout that Hersh’s version doesn’t hinge on a government-wide conspiracy.
“Myths can be projected through an uncoordinated effort with a variety of people really just doing their jobs,” he writes. “Of course, when enough people are obscuring the truth, the results can seem, well, conspiratorial. Hersh is fond of pointing out that thousands of government employees and contractors presumably knew about the NSA’s wiretapping, but only one, Edward Snowden, came forward.”
Not surprisingly, both Peter Bergen of CNN and Mark Bowden, who wrote The Finish, an account of the hunt for bin Laden, felt aggrieved by Mahler’s takeout, which Mahler duly noted in a follow-up piece.
Bowden, whom I know and have respected, risks being labeled a Washington stooge for writing at Vanity Fair‘s website that: “It’s not often that the most distinguished journalistic institution in America wades so fully into the crackpot world of Internet theorizing, where all information, no matter its source, is weightless and equal.”
Bowden has recently gotten dinged by more than The Times.
He writes in The Finish that Vice President Biden told Barack Obama in a war cabinet meeting: “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.” Bowden writes that Biden “felt strongly about it and never hesitated to disagree at meetings like this, something the president had encouraged him to do,” but the veep himself undercut that account the other day in asserting that he told the president in private, after the war cabinet meeting, that he should pursue the operation.
“As we walked out of the room and went upstairs, I told him my opinion, that I said that I thought he should go but to follow his own instincts,” Biden said.
It is instructive to note that in an era of deep partisan rancor, there was nary a critical peep from Republicans typically critical of Barack Obama’s every move when it came to the White House narrative of bin Laden’s death, although there was some partisan grumbling over the Al Qaeda leader being given a hasty burial at sea according to Muslim tradition. The muted response from Republicans may be because the assassination provided a sense of closure for many Americans 10 long years after the 9/11 attacks and even an obdurate GOP opposition understood that they needed to keep their distance.
Meanwhile, the myth-making machine has feasted on the story with numerous Hollywood-esque narratives, including the 2012 movie Zero Dark Thirty, which propagated the lie that the use of torture led the CIA to bin Laden.
American history is filled with stories of great moment that turned out to be false, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, Gulf of Tonkin attack and Bush administration claims about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Only a fraction of the true story of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is known, and the Bush administration cover-up of why the attacks were carried out despite the White House, CIA and FBI being repeatedly warned of them still holds. Not only has the final word not come out about this malfeasance of enormous and arguably criminal proportions, hardly any word about it has.
So while the score was finally settled with Osama bin Laden, the entire affair still lacks that elusive moral clarity because the competing narratives are so different. True closure will not be attained until the real story and not the myth, as messy and inconvenient as the real truth may be, is known.
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for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
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