What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death?

YAAAAAASSSSSSSSSS

 

But no one doubts that he's dead, right?

This is about how he got that way.

 

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Without any real evidence to back the other side, NO, I really don't.

What exactly has been uncovered to support this discussion? That Bowden did not see the burial photographs? Surry, but that's nothing, perhaps basis for criticizing his journalism practices, but not evidence the raid was faked. Gonna take a lot more than that to get me to care about some Seymour Hersh-manufactured pseudo controversy.

As long as it is true that we killed OBL on that May day in 2011---which not even Al Qaeda disputes--I'm not particularly bothered by a fuzzy detail or two.

 

I don't think anyone believes OBL is still alive.

I do think it matters whether we shot and killed him and dumped him in the ocean and sold that story to the world, as opposed to blew up his house with a drone and then pretended he was killed in a raid.

Clearly there was a raid. Clearly someone was killed in Abbottabad. Clearly we had to dump a helicopter there. The idea that we "staged" that entire fucking thing is insulting, and lunacy of the highest order.

Whether or not OBL was in there, and died in the way we claimed, I think is a very fair question.

Lastly: I'd trust Bowden's sources and reporting over Hersh's sources and reporting (especially now) every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

 

If Bowden relied on the description of the photos from a source - no matter how "good" a source it was - and didn't see them himself, he owes it to the reader to tell us that.

 

We have been over this. You're simply supposed to trust big-name writers writing for big-name publications.

 

If you're looking for curiosity, intellectual or otherwise, this is not the place.

 

That

Or, which.

 

This, also the best sources tend to be people who have grudges or axes to grind.

You also have sources who believe they are telling a reporter something that is the greater good.

The worst kind are the ones who lie to you.

Hersh seems to be the kind of reporter who only traffics in the first kind of sources and deeply believes that Bowden was lead astray on an over-reliance on governmental spin and the last kind of sources.

Bowden seems to be the kind of reporter who traffics in the first and second kind of sources.

I highly believe that Bowden's story had some elements of spin to it and I also believe that Hersh's sources found the White House's victory lap to be distasteful and began feeding him information in an effort to discredit the current administration.

It is also possible that the intelligence agencies are so compartmentalized that what Bowden was told, it was the CIA's hard work that lead to OBL, and Hersh's tale of an informant are both true and that their sources told them the extent of their knowledge and didn't know about the other part.

As far as what happened to the body, I don't give a shit.

 

Actually there is a not-insignificant number of the right-wing screech machine that really does dispute that OBL is dead: they contend that that shifty lying Mooslim Neegro Obumbo just made the whole story up to make himself look badass and Osama is snuggled away in some super secret hideaway somewhere, of course with the secret connivance of the Obumbo administration, and will return in triumph someday when Barack reveals everything and ushers in his worldwide caliphate.

Click your radio to your nearest righty screech station any time you want and I guarantee within a couple hours some yahoo calls in with some version of this story, and usually the host response is, "yeah that answers a lot of questions. Makes sense."

 

Everyone knows Obama got Trump to put Osama up in a secret gay sex chamber filled with all the coke he can snort.