“Inform as well as influence.” Why Hersh could be right about the Osama Bin Laden’s raid.

The US government and the CIA have a long history of developing cover stories. In the past 67 years Langley made up alternative versions of what happened on the ground on numerous occasions.  In my intel class at Columbia, our professor used to repeat one thing about leaks: “Inform as well as influence.” That should say it all.

Seymour Hersh is under attack by many other reporters for his 10,000 word long article on The killing of Osama Bin Laden.. Some of them are trying to discredit his story.

Some contradictions about the Bin Laden’s raid have been reported in the independent media. There have been articles about Osama Bin Laden being shot multiple times and some of the SEALS on the mission emptying their guns into the body. Also, nobody has seen pictures of the body, nobody has ever seen evidence of his body dumped in the water.

Even more mysterious is helicopter that went down during the mission, nobody really knows what happened, but it forced president Barack Obama to admit that US forces were present in Pakistan, forcing him to announce to the public that Bin Laden had been killed.  I am not going into the Rob Bissonette and Robert O’Neill stories who both claim to have shot Bin Laden.

Amongst Hersh’s revelations, it doesn’t surprise me that ISI knew about OBL’s whereabouts and used that information to put leverage on Al Qaida and the Taliban. Also, they wanted to use it to their best advantage and not giving his position to the US without anything in return, after all why would they give him up in such an easy way when Bin Laden was such valuable target? Each country serves their own interests. I always found it very hard to believe that Osama Bin Laden was able to live in Pakistan without being detected.

After Obama’s announcement there were leaks about the raid. Then the official version of the raid was never really questioned by main stream media. The movie Zero Dark Thirty sealed that official version in everybody’s mind.

Now a new version of the raid, and somehow even more consistent, came out, what strikes me the most is that the American public is so surprised.