Osama bin Laden’s assassination was monumental for all Americans, considering he was the leader for the terrorists behind the attacks of 9/11 was finally brought to justice in a top secret Navy SEAL mission. However, did the American people really get the full story of what happened? Seymour Hersh wrote a lengthy piece in the London Review of Books in May that set out to challenge the “official” story of bin Laden’s death which heavily relied on the assertion of an unnamed, retired senior US intelligence official. Hersh found that;
• The 2011 raid on the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan was not an intense firefight involving 23 navy Seals (contrary to popular belief), but a Hollywood like set up in which Pakistani officials simply handed bin Laden over to the SEAL’s for execution.
• The only shots fired the night of the bin Laden raid were the ones fired by Navy SEAL’s.
• Pakistan’s military had been holding bin Laden hostage for years and a “walk-in” informant for the U.S. embassy in Islamabad tipped off CIA officials, revealing where bin Laden was located.
• It was false that the CIA had traced back one of bin Laden’s couriers to the Abbottabad.
Times Magazine is now in the hot seat; how do they explain these secrets uncovered by Hersh? New York Times reporter Johnathan Mancer says, “[it is] impossible to know what was true and what wasn’t” and that bin Laden’s death is “floating somewhere between fact and mythology”.