Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Sy, Osama, Obama, the CIA...and a personal apology.
Sorry, folks. I had hoped to write a long piece about the controversy over the death of Osama Bin Laden. But work is pressing and deadlines approacheth. To make matters infinitely worse, two people in my household developed computer problems which required attention. One was a laptop issue -- I hate working on laptops -- and the other was the networking problem from The Hell Beneath Eight Other Hells.
(It can be satisfying to bring an old desktop system back to life. After a guy reaches a certain age, the idea of tossing out aged equipment carries a kind of symbolic terror. But desktops are big and roomy and easy to tinker with, while laptops are compact and fussy and no fun at all.)
I will have more on the Hersh/Obama/Osama controversy soon. In the meantime, enjoy Hersh's appearance on Democracy Now (embedded above), in which he responds to his critics.
Morell. I've been noting the prominence of this guy in the anti-Hersh backlash coverage. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell says that Hersh got it all laughably wrong.
When I fist read that story, my immediate response was: Could Morell have been Hersh's source? Morell certainly was in the right position, and his current harsh denunciations of Hersh may be a way of deflecting suspicion. If this whodunnit were an Agatha Christie story, Poirot would take a very close look at a certain former Deputy Director who doth protest too much.
Morell's sympathies are clearly with the GOP, which means that his current attacks on Hersh don't stem from any concerns about protecting the Obama administration. But the former CIA officer probably does care about protecting the US-Saudi relationship. Hersh, in a little-noted (but extremely important) passage, says that the Saudis directly funded Osama Bin Laden during his Pakistan sojourn. The Powers-That-Be can't let that claim congeal into accepted wisdom, even though the claim is probably quite true.
I also happened to glimpse Morrell on the local Fox News affiliate, spewing the usual Foxshit about -- you guessed it! -- Benghazi. Yes. That again.
And the guy has nothing new to say. He's still repeating the usual Fox drivel about the post-attack "talking points" given to Susan Rice before she appeared on teevee, as if anyone cares.
Did Morell happen to mention that the person who gave Rice those talking points was neocon favorite Victoria Nuland? No, he did not. Nuland is part of the Kagan clan, a.k.a. The Untouchables, and Morell's refusal to mention her name says much.
For a long time, I have believed that the Romney campaign was coordinating with an intelligence insider who helped to concoct the whole Benghazi/"Innocence of Muslims" imbroglio. (In previous posts, we traced the dissemination of that video to a small troop of deniable intelligence assets seeking to undermine the current administration.) You may recall that, back in 2012, this humble blog offered some speculative commentary about Romney's links to the intelligence community. I don't know if Morell was the one who acted as Romney's mole, but if you share my belief that such a mole existed, then you may want to place Morell on the list of suspects.
Watch this guy. Maybe he hopes to become CIA Director (or DNI) after a Republican victory in 2016. He's definitely a "playah."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
I watched an NSC spokesman on MSNBC, poo-pooing the Hersh article. He was all non-denial denials, and made strawman arguments misconstruing what Hersh actually said.
For example, he asked why would the Paks set themselves up to be embarrassed like that, i.e. by how easily we got past their air defenses? But they didn't. We embarrassed them against their wishes with our hastily made-up cover story.
Scenario (per Hersh):
1. Paks had been hiding and protecting bin Laden all along, with Saudi funding.
2. We found out (via the walk-in). We were pissed.
3. They said, Okay, sorry, well, you guys can come and get him, but take him far away and then announce you had droned him in the mountains of Afghanistan. Don't mention he was ever here.
4. The extraction went awry - copter crash and all - and impossible to hide. So we came up with another cover story on the fly, with Obama embellishments. THAT story embarrassed the Paks.
5. As embarrassing as the story was, it was better than allowing the Saudis to find out the Paks had cooperated with us. So the Paks had to just fuss and bear it.
All quite true, Michael. The anti-Herhians are responding not to anything that Sy actually wrote, but to a fictional story that they want us to THINK that Sy wrote.
That said, do keep in mind that there were initial reports in the Pakistani press that the ISI helped with the raid.
Also keep in mind the fact that Goss said that he knew where Bin Laden was in 2005. Osama was almost certainly on Pakistani soil at that time. Hersh was told that the Pakistanis captured Bin Laden in 2006. I'm thinking that they captured him, and placed him close to their main military training academy, in order to protect him -- and to prevent an American attack.
I wonder if the so-called "snub" by the Saudis this week has anything to do with their finding out via Hersh's article that they had been bamboozled by the US and Pak.
I wonder if the Pakistanis had bid Laden since 2005-6, and THOUGHT they were hiding it from us, but in fact we knew all along and we hid from them that we knew.
Why? Because it was convenient for US for bin Laden to stay missing for a long time. Remember how Bush gleefully said he didn't give an F about bin Laden's whereabouts? And the time before that, when we had him in our gunsights but the Pentagon refused to give the kill order until some impossible hurdles were cleared?
Double-cross, triple-cross. That's the nature of the business it seems.
And we still don't know the role the Saudis played in 9-11. But Bush and Cheney knew, eh?
Eh...no. W would not have looked like an idiot on that day.
And with that, the subject is CLOSED. No matter what you write, there will be no further 9/11 discussion here. I am sorry, but hard experience so dictates.
Post a Comment