An expose
published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with
his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.
Author Seymour M. Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take
credit for the al Qaeda leader's death. This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books,
forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then
corroborate the president’s version of events.“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of
U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night
raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,”
Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counter terrorism policies.
Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This
individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was
knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in
Abottabad.”Hersh’s source alleged that the Pakistani government had an
active role in approving and implementing the raid on bin Laden’s compound.
In addition, the source said that the Obama administration
originally agreed to announce bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike
rather than shot during an active Special Forces mission. “Obama’s speech was put together in a rush,” Hersh wrote of
Obama’s announcement of Operation Neptune Spear to Americans. “This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would
create chaos in the weeks following,” he added. “This was not the fog of war,” Hersh quoted his anonymous
source as saying. “The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis
and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong
– that wasn’t even discussed,” the source added.
“And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover
story on the fly,” the source said of Obama’s advisers’ response to his speech
on the raid, Hersh wrote. Hersh’s report also accuses the Obama administration
of embellishing the details of the raid itself and presenting al Qaeda as a
bigger threat than it actually was before bin Laden’s death. The White House did not comment on Hersh’s claims.
Via. The hill
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