BIN LADEN’S DEATH AND THE FAIRY TALE OF THE WAR ON TERROR
by Peter Bloom on June 9, 2015
Recent revelations have challenged the official version of Bin Laden’s death, but the real cover-up concerns the motivations behind the War on Terror.
The pioneering investigative reporter Seymour Hersh shook the political world recently with a story alleging that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was a cover-up by the US government and Pakistan. Among his most startling claims is that the US and Pakistan collaborated on this mission; a deal that was later betrayed by President Obama’s public announcement of the death as a US-led raid.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has flatly denied these allegations, referring to the charges as completely “baseless.” White House national security spokesman Ned Price publicly dismissed the claims, stating “There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact-check each one.”
In a spirited response, Hersh stood by his “alternative history of the War on Terror.” By contrast, he accuses the official versions of the events as being riddled with “lies” and describes them as comparable to a children’s “fairy tale.”
Many in the media have gone on record substantially challenging Hersh’s reporting. Echoing the CIA’s own rejection of the story as “utter nonsense,” a CNN analyst and author of a book about the raid called the report a “farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.”
In a more personal attack, Max Fisher at Vox declared that this, “sadly, is in line with Hersh’s recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”
These criticisms miss the bigger picture. The furor over how Bin Laden was killed — whether the administration’s account is true or not — means little in the face of the broader “fairy tale” and cover-up that is the War on Terror itself.
Read more: http://roarmag.org/2015/06/fairy-tale-war-on-terror/
