Obama Lied About Osama's Death and The Media Didn't Say Boo

But Parsed Every Word of Trump's Announcement on the Iran Strike

On June 22, President Donald Trump made what is arguably the most dramatic national security announcement since Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Declared Trump, "Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated." No sooner did Trump say this than the media started poring through his words like Talmudic scholars. “Uh, Mr. President, what do you mean by ‘obliterate?’”

In 2011—no surprise—that same media failed to ask then President Barack Obama even the most basic questions about the death of Osama bin Laden. Everything about the raid on bin Laden’s compound was suspicious—the details on the ground, the timing of it, the timing of Obama’s announcement—but the media simply chose not to know, certainly not when the truth mattered. Fortunately, as we shall see, Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh filled in the void.

As Google AI informs the reader in its artless way, “Seymour Hersh published his controversial piece on the killing of Osama bin Laden in the London Review of Books (LRB) because he had trouble getting it published in the US media.” Wonder why?

The week leading up to the May 1 raid was a busy one for Obama. As I documented in an earlier article, “How the Birth Certificate Con Backfired on Obama and His Lawyers,” Obama requested his Hawaiian birth certificate on April 22, received it (or something like it) on April 25, presented it to the nation on April 27, humiliated Donald Trump at the Correspondents Dinner on April 30, had Osama whacked early on May 1, and later in the same day, May 1, the high holy day on the communist calendar, covered himself in glory in an address from the White House. This timing was not coincidental.

On the day after the dinner, April 30, at about 1:30 p.m. eastern time, Obama gave his final approval for the attack on the bin Laden compound. A half hour later, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying 23 SEAL team members took off from Jalalabad Airfield in Afghanistan and launched Operation Neptune Spear into the history books.

Wrote Obama in his 2020 memoir A Promised Land, “This was the first and only time as president that I’d watch a military operation unfold in real time.” That said, he shared no specifics. What happened in those twenty minutes, especially after the SEAL team entered the house, Obama chose not to discuss, not even in retrospect.

The details were not pretty, nor do they align with the information Obama and his people supplied the media in the immediate wake of the assault. Obama also refrained from serving up any snippets from his speech on the night of May 1. Crafted by adviser Ben Rhodes, the speech would later become a source of controversy, not just for its inaccuracies, but also for the very fact that Obama gave it.

The following afternoon, May 2, future CIA director John Brennan met with the press to clarify details. By profession and personal inclination, Brennan had no particular interest in telling the truth. Even more obviously than Obama, he was spinning events to bolster Obama’s electoral chances in 2012.

“The concern was that bin Laden would oppose any type of capture operation,” Brennan told the press. “Indeed, he did. It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight and that’s when the remains were removed.” Obama had said the same the night before, “After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

As would be revealed soon enough, there was no plan to capture Osama. He did not resist. There was no firefight. Equally false was Brennan’s overarching message, namely that Obama “made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory.”

In his 2014 book, Worthy Fights. CIA Director Leon Panetta offered a more accurate account. He monitored the action from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. According to Panetta, the SEALs shot and killed Osama’s son between the second and third floor of the building.

As the SEALs moved to the third floor, they saw a tall, bearded man poke his head out of a doorway. Recognizing him, one team member shot at the man and missed. “The man disappeared back into the room, and an AK- 47 was visible in the doorjamb,” wrote Panetta. After shoving some women aside, “Our team members saw the bearded man and shot him twice, once above the left eye and once in the chest.”

Seymour Hersh is no lightweight. Among other accomplishments, he broke the story of 1968’s My Lai massacre and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004. In a carefully researched, well-sourced, 10,000-word 2015 piece in the London Review of Books Hersh offered arguably the most accurate account of the killing of Osama.

According to Hersh, “the most blatant lie” Obama and his staff told was that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were unaware of the planned raid. Another noteworthy White House lie was that the CIA learned of bin Laden’s location by relentlessly tracking his couriers.

Hersh contended that a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer betrayed the secret in return for some chunk of the twenty-five-million-dollar reward offered by the United States. Hersh made a convincing argument that, in fact, the ISI had captured Osama in Afghanistan in 2006 and held him as hostage to keep al-Qaeda in check.

“Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,” a retired official American official told Hersh. “Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.” “Murder” is a little strong—after all, war is hell—but had a police SWAT team executed a similar raid in the United States and killed an unarmed person of color, Obama would be the first to condemn the cops.

As Hersh’s sources explained, Pakistan officials would not have allowed the American helicopters to enter their air space were there not a quid pro quo. The “quo” included eighteen new F-16 fighter aircraft and covert cash payments to senior Pakistani officials.

Exiting the compound was potentially much hairier than entering as one of the helicopters was damaged upon landing and subsequently blown up by the SEALs. That explosion had to attract attention at a nearby Pakistani military installation. Instead of scurrying out on the one viable chopper, the remaining SEALs waited for the backup to arrive. Said the official, “They would not have blown the chopper—no commo gear is worth a dozen lives—unless they knew they were safe.”

To take the pressure off the cooperating Pakistanis, the White House was supposed to wait a week and then announce that Osama had been killed by a drone strike in Afghanistan. The blown helicopter gave Obama and his political people the excuse to press for an immediate announcement.

This “outraged” Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say,” wrote Gates in his memoir Duty. “Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit.”

Panetta attributed the decision to go public about the raid to Obama. After reviewing the details, wrote Panetta, “the President was now convinced. ‘We shoot for tonight,’ he said, regarding the plan for announcing the action. ‘Let’s have a draft within an hour.’”

This political grandstanding exposed the role of the Pakistani officials. “They felt Obama sold them down the river,” Hersh’s source told him. “We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation. It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the military-to-military counter-terrorism relationship.”

In May 2015, Carlotta Gall of the New York Times fact checked Hersh and found nothing to refute. Concurred Gall, “From the moment it was announced to the public, the tale of how Osama bin Laden met his death in a Pakistani hill town in May 2011 has been a changeable feast.” So conceded the Times three years after Obama was reelected.

Obama had one more card to play that memorable week. On May 2, “wingman” Attorney General Eric Holder met with Obama at the White House with no reason given on the logs. The two men had much to discuss.

The following day Holder had an all-day meeting scheduled with the House Judiciary Committee. The hit on bin Laden made a great distraction from the scheduled subject, an operation called “Fast and Furious.” A year later, in June 2012, the House would hold Holder in contempt for his failure to turn over documents related to this scandal, the first time Congress had taken such a dramatic move against a sitting Cabinet official.

No matter. The media had even less interest in Fast and Furious than they did the holes in Obama’s Osama story. It was 2012 after all, and they had a president to reelect.

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