Seymour Hersh's Osama bin Laden endgame blockbuster story is getting a bit more coverage in the wider mainstream media than some of his other recent post-Abu-Ghraib stories (such as, for instance, his announcement that various top brass and Special Forces people were all Opus Dei members - a statement hotly disputed by the named brass as well as by Opus Dei). I think this is because it tells a story that appeals to many groups who don't like some or all of the official narrative as told by the United States government: that Obama succeeded where Bush failed, that the Pakistani government had no idea Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, that the Pakistani government was shocked, appalled, and outraged at the US raid's violation of their sovereignty over their own land, that bin Laden was killed and his corpse buried at sea because any on-land burial site would be an instant shrine for jihadists.
There are problems, to put it mildly, with the official USG narrative. But those problems don't make Hersh's any more accurate. Like the official narrative, Hersh's looks like it was crafted not to tell the truth, but to cover a few butts.
Follow me past the cartouche and I'll explain.
Hersh's defenders have been toting around this article by Carlotta Gall, a New York Times journalist who has a lot of experience writing about Pakistan, in which Gall states that some of what Hersh wrote "tracks" with what she saw in Pakistan.
I do wish to point out that Gall's article is titled "The Detail in Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden Story that Rings True", not "Sy Hersh is 100% Right about Everything". Because if one reads past the first few paragraphs, it becomes obvious that Gall doesn't think Sy Hersh is, in fact, 100% right about everything.
Down at the bottom of her article, Gall, after having noted that Hersh agrees with her that the Pakistani authorities had to have known where bin Laden was and had to have alerted the US to his presence, politely states that the idea of Hersh's that the Pakistanis and/or Americans created the "treasure trove" of bin Laden documents out of whole cloth (in order to, according to Hersh, present the idea that OBL was still actively plotting terror actions instead of being this helpless broken old beard-dying guy) "rings less true" to her.
And that is, I think, a key objection to Hersh's storifying here. As Jaime Fuller's NY Mag piece states, Hersh has become notorious in recent years for running with a juicy tidbit or two just because he likes it, and not seeming to care all that much about whether it's true.
Hersh likes the idea of a super-smart, super-heroic Pakistani government not only knowing where bin Laden was, but also keeping bin Laden under house arrest for six years and fooling the silly Americans, then tossing him to the silly Americans and aiding the Americans in creating six years' worth of treasure trove in order to make the silly Americans happy, and letting the Americans stage their silly little play-raid (all whilst faking extreme and rather realistic outrage at the violation of Pakistani soveriegnity), then telling OBL's surviving wives and children to lie to the world press about what happened to their patriarch, then making sure that thousands of American and Pakistani troops uphold that and a whole bunch of other lies. It's a tale that pleases Hersh for the same reason it pleases the Newsmax crowd, because it takes away a key trump card Obama holds over Bush with respect to antiterrorism: Neutralizing the 9/11 mastermind that GW Bush couldn't be bothered to track down.
Now, the US' version official tale has holes in it too - but the intended function of those holes is similar to those in the holes in Hersh's story: to somehow protect the Pakistani government.
The key holes, just like with Hersh's tale, revolve around trying to protect the Pakistani government from people like me who wonder out loud how OBL could hang out undetected by the Pakistani authorities for six years in a walled and defensibly-arrayed compound that in the local context of urban Abbottabad screamed "Important and Non-Ordinary Person Lives Here", a compound within 800 yards of the Pakistani West Point (not to mention a couple of blocks from a nearby police station). Aside from things like Leon Panetta's unguarded comments in the immediate aftermath of the raid - comments about how the US didn't notify the Pakistani authorities beforehand because they thought the Pakistanis would warn bin Laden about it - the USG has been trying to uphold the Sergeant Schultz myth with regard to Pakistan: That the Pakistani officials knew nothing and saw nothing.
Why? Because Pakistan is supposed to be one of our allies in the War on Terror. They're supposed to be a force fighting against jihadism, not cuddling up to it. To acknowledge that the Pakistani government's top people knew he was where he was, and to fear that they would warn him of any attempts to kill or capture him, is to de facto admit that the Pakistanis had been protecting bin Laden as they'd been protecting other jihadists (the protection of said other jihadists being a key point in Ms. Gall's other recent stories on Pakistan, such as this one).
Now, the holes in Hersh's tale are much more flattering to the Pakistani government. (And very unflattering to Obama, which is the main reason Hersh and his defenders love this tale so much.) According to those holes, the Pakistanis knew where he was, but he was really under house arrest, and not a threat to anyone, but the Pakistanis, out of the goodness of their hearts, let the silly Americans know where he was and then created and planted six years' worth of treasure trove, and then pretended to be deeply outraged about the violation of their sovereignity.
That's really what this is all about, I suspect: Somebody in the Pakistani government wants to replace a narrative that makes the Pakistanis look like buffoons with one that makes them look super-cunning antiterror warriors. Both are equally untrue, and both strive to keep people from considering a much more likely scenario, one embarrassing to both the Pakistani and US governments, which is this: The Pakistani government, in order to please a non-trivial number of jihadist sympathizers in the country, was protecting bin Laden just as they'd protected so many other jihadis, and somebody in the PG got so fed up with it (and/or decided to see what sort of rewards he could get for his knowledge) that he made contact with the appropriate USG reps and clued them in.
3:22 PM PT: For the record, while Hersh holds that bin Laden was held prisoner by the Pakistani government, Gall states that he was in fact an "intelligence asset" so valuable to the ISI that an entire desk was devoted to him. She also uses variations on the word "protect" to describe how the ISI treated bin Laden. One can see why the Pakistani government would prefer Hersh's version of events.
Sun May 17, 2015 at 6:43 PM PT: Here's the Carlotta Gall story from March 23, 2014 - well over a year ago - on how she was finally able to get confirmation from various Pakistani sources that the ISI ran bin Laden in Pakistan - and cooperated with various Taliban and Al Qaeda factions:
mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/magazine/what-pakistan-knew-about-bin-laden.html?referrer=