The Truth About the Bin Laden Raid

Seymour Hersh, a storied journalist whose revelations led to the Church Committee hearing in the 1970s, has attracted a lot of flak in recent years as someone who now acts as if he has been left in the sun for too long. Admittedly, his article about the Benghazi attack struck us at SOFREP as being completely bonkers. However, Hersh’s recent work about the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden is the most thorough and accurate we have yet seen.

Over the years, we’ve stuck our necks out a few times in an attempt to write about what really happened on the OBL raid, and received plenty of backlash for it. This is to be expected when America has made such a strong emotional investment in the War on Terror over the last 14 years. Americans were so happy to see Bin Laden killed that we drank our own koolaid. We took what our government told us at face value and never questioned it, no matter how inconsistent and illogical the narrative spun by the White House was.

A former CIA officer got quite peeved with me when I questioned the Hollywood narrative of the raid floated out to the public in the film, Zero Dark Thirty. We are made to believe that a single female CIA officer challenged her agency’s status quo and tracked down Bin Laden as a matter of personal revenge for the completely unconnected FOB Chapman bombing?

In the movie, she advances the thesis that Bin Laden could not be running an international terrorist organization from a cave in Afghanistan. Well, he was essentially living in an urban cave in Abbottabad on house arrest without an internet connection or telephone. Perhaps Bin Laden was not nearly as important as we are led to believe by this stage in the game.

But what’s not to like about the publicly stated narrative? Every governmental organization involved gets to claim their share of the credit. JSOC, the CIA, and the White House all come out looking like heroes and we even get a movie that plays extremely well to modern American sensibilities by touching upon the raise of women in the workplace. The truth, that Pakistani Generals like Kayani knew about the raid ahead of time and made sure the Pakistani military didn’t interfere, begins to erode away at the heroic narrative we are told about brilliant CIA operations and daring Navy SEAL commando raids.