Wishesh June 2015 Online E-Magazine

World NEWS
HOW WAS OSAMA
BIN LADEN
TRACKED AND
KILLED
Seymour Hersh, America’s most controversial
investigative journalist, caused an uproar by alleging
that the U.S. government’s account of the 2011 killing of
Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was a lie.
Seymour Hersh has claimed in an article published in the London Review of
Books, that Pakistan’s military leaders have secretly agreed to an elaborate but
staged attack, that a frail and unarmed bin Laden is blown to pieces by closerange
rifle fire and his mangled body parts were thrown out from a helicopter
over the Hindu Kush rather than being buried at sea.
Hersh claimed that the CIA agents did not uncover the bin Laden’s location, instead, that information
is handed to them by a Pakistani official who has betrayed his country for a $25 million bounty.
Critics and White House officials have strongly condemned the allegations and accused Hersh of
conspiratorial excess. He relies on anonymous sources and unnamed insiders and builds a narrative
of events that are impossible to verify, they alleged.
According to Hersh’s account, a former senior
Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the U.S.
Embassy in Islamabad and told the CIA station chief
that Osama bin Laden is in Abbottabad.
Hersh told that he began working on the story
immediately after the U.S. raid on the bin Laden
compound in Pakistan. He said he had doubted, from
the beginning, the administration’s account of the
death of bin Laden on May 2, 2011, at the hands of
U.S. Navy SEALs. The administration said the SEALs
shot their way into the compound, near two Pakistani
military installations in Abbottabad and killed the
terrorist leader.
Hersh told that the SEALs encountered no opposition.
They did not have to shoot their way in. Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had hidden bin Laden
in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, Hersh said.
In 2010, a former Pakistan intelligence officer told
the CIA, that bin Laden is in the compound. He was
paid much of the $25 million reward that the U.S. had
offered for information on bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Armed with the former intelligence officer’s
information, Americans began planning to raid the
compound. Pakistanis knew of the plans. Americans
asked Pakistan security for physical details of the
compound and “the Pakistanis agreed to permit a fourman
American cell to be set up a liaison office” near the
compound for the coming raid.
Hersh also said that Pakistan’s top two military leaders,
Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and
Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI,
knew of the raid well in advance. In other words, US’s
so-called Pakistani allies had kept the world’s most
sought-after terrorist under wraps while the United
States searched for him and they admitted to this only
after an informant disclosed what they were doing.
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WWW.WISHESH.COM | JUNE 2015