Seymour Hersh: Everything We Were Told About Osama bin Laden’s Killing Was a Lie

Seymour Hersh: Everything We Were Told About Osama bin Laden’s Killing Was a Lie

You may not know anything about Sy Hersh, so here's a little background. He did some brilliant investigative reporting in 1970, when he broke the story of the My Lai massacre and won the Pulitzer. You may now be doing some arithmetic in your head. Yes, 1970 was a long time ago. Hersh is now nearly 80 years old, and his reporting since My Lai has been hit and miss. Maybe more miss. Historian Arthur Schlesinger called him, "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered," and that sums it up pretty well. A few years back, he came up with the theory that US Special Forces were being controlled by Opus Dei, which sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel. Basically Hersh's recent "reporting" seems to consist of unquestioning, unverified, naive acceptance of sensational, wild-eyed conspiracy theories from anonymous sources. Given the nature of probability, those sources sometimes turn out to be correct, sometimes not.

CNN's Peter Bergen points out that he knows from personal experience (he examined the scene of the bin Laden raid), as well as his own follow-up contact with one of Hersh's sources (Durrani), that some of Hersh's claims are obviously false. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that just about everything is false, as claimed by former CIA head Michael Morell.

It will take time to sort out whether there are any worthwhile and valid revelations in Hersh's article.