Officially, the killing of Osama bin Laden went down like this:
In the early morning of May 2, 2011, a team of US Navy SEALS flew from Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. One of their Black Hawk helicopters crashed on the grounds of the compound during landing. The SEALS scaled three outer walls to reach the main building, where they found bin Laden and his wife on the second floor. The team shot bin Laden twice, killing him. Three other men and a woman at the compound were also killed during the operation. It was all over within minutes.
Following the shooting, the SEAL team left with bin Laden's body, which was buried at sea with the proper Muslim ritual. Hard drives and other evidence were taken from the compound.
The successful mission was the result of a decade-long effort by the CIA and U.S. military, who secretly tracked bin Laden's couriers to find his compound. Much of this was depicted in the film Zero Dark Thirty.
So case closed right? Not so fast.
One year ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh turned almost everything we know about the bin Laden killing on its head.
Hersh claimed bin Laden wasn't hiding in Pakistan, but was being kept under house arrest by the Pakistani military. They were even taking care of him with funds from Saudi Arabia.
A tipster trying to collect the $25 million bounty for bin Laden informed US officials in Pakistan of the terrorist's location. Pakistan confirmed it and allowed the U.S. to go in and kill him. What's more, bin Laden did not receive a Muslim burial at sea -- parts of his dismembered body were tossed from the Navy SEAL helicopter.
So if Hersh's claims are true, bin Laden wasn't brought down by the work of America's crack intelligence forces. He was ratted out by an informer looking to get paid ($25 million is worth even more in Pakistan). The operation wasn't a daring high-risk mission. The SEALS were shooting a sitting duck at extremely close range.
Fellow journalists and government officials were quick to reject Hersh's alternative account. The New Yorker magazine refused to publish his story, despite their long history with Hersh. Mark Bowden, who wrote about a book about the operation called The Finish, defended the "official" version of events. He interviewed dozens of sources involved in the mission, including CIA analysts, military officers, and elected officials. Bowden argues that if the story were fabricated, all of his sources would had to have been part of a wide-ranging conspiracy.
Yet Seymour Hersh usually turns out to be right. His record of exposing wrongdoing goes back decades. In 1969, he uncovered the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers killed hundreds of civilians in a village in Vietnam. In 2004, he exposed the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The list goes on and on. And every time, the government has denied everything.
I'm not saying we should believe Seymour Hersh's version of the bin Laden killing based on his journalistic track record. But another journalist, Carlotta Gall, supports Hersh's claims that the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, had been hiding bin Laden. According to Gall's high-level source, a Pakistani Army brigadier told the CIA where bin Laden was hiding. She believes Hersh "...is following up on a story many of us assembled parts of."
Let's suppose Hersh's version is true. Why would our government have chosen to distort the facts to such an extent? Would the American people really care if they knew bin Laden was found based on an anonymous tip, as opposed to the intelligence work depicted in Zero Dark Thirty?
One possible explanation is President Obama wanted to exploit the killing of bin Laden to increase his reelection chances in 2012.
He already had bin Laden right where he wanted him. There were different options he could have pursued for his capture or killing. Why not stage a ready-for-Hollywood action story, starring the President as the heroic, cool-as-ice Commander in Chief?
This theory may have some legs, but also borders on paranoia. I have difficulty believing it myself. However, I won't argue that the government did manipulate certain elements of the story from the beginning.
At first, it was reported bin Laden was armed during the raid, and used his wife as a human shield. We were also told the President and his advisers watched the mission live, via helmet cams worn by the Navy SEALS. Neither of these initial reports turned out to be true.
Obviously, there are some details we won't know for years. After all, the mission was a covert operation including multiple intelligence agencies. But even Seymour Hersh admits the basic facts are true.
A Navy SEAL team, under President Obama's orders, killed the world's most wanted terrorist: a man behind the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.
If President Obama and his team really did manipulate the facts to suit their agenda, that's just how governments roll. We should all know that by now, right?
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