Frederick Douglass

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them..." Frederick Douglass

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Schmidle Osama Bin Laden Death Hoax Update: A Study In Disinformation

The propaganda is hitting the fan.

In order for the much bally-hoed killing of OBL to be true he would, of course, have had to be alive in May. The government has released no evidence to support this contention. Nothing! Zero! Nada! Bubkis! Niente! We only have their word for it.

And to believe them, we must disbelieve the numerous reports of his death over the years, including those issued by members of his family who claimed to have attended his funeral.

We must disbelieve the numerous reports, including those contained in CIA documents, that he had terminal medical problems in 2001.

Of course none of this speculation would be necessary if they had produced evidence (as they did for the capture of Saddam Hussein) that their Hollywood raid had actually captured the former (?) CIA asset. Something that we must assume would have benefited Obama's re-election effort.

Yet nothing but absurd claims about a desire not to offend Arab sensibilities.

So now we have had the initial Schmidle deception in the New Yorker; it was discredited by a woman named Fair; and now we have this new piece also bashing Schmidle' execrable piece, and which plays directly into the anti-Pakistan motif of late adopted for public consumption by Washington. Nicely done!

The story of how bin Laden was found is fiction

According to Hillhouse, who attributes the news to her sources inside the intelligence comunity, a Pakistan intelligence officer came forward with the information of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for the $25 million reward and U.S. citizenship for his family. The informant, Hillhouse says, claimed that the Saudis had been paying the Pakistani military and intelligence agency, ISI, to shelter bin Laden under house arrest.

"The C.I.A. and friends then set about proving that OBL was indeed there," Hillhouse writes. "And they did."

Hillhouse says that the United States then approached Pakistan, which agreed to cooperate on the raid. A cover story that bin Laden was killed in a drone attack was designed but had to be scrapped at the last minute when that lone Black Hawk spun to the ground. A new story, of a courier, was used in its place.

"The cooperation was why there were no troops in Abottabad," she writes. "It had always seemed very far-fetched to me that a helicopter could crash and later destroyed in an area with such high military concentration without the Pakistanis noticing."


Oh this is good work! Demonize the Pakistanis and the Saudis--a two-fer. Then comes the money shot, the raison d'etre of this canny propaganda--they set about proving OBL was there "and they did." Time to break down the set.

It's standard practice to insert a few grains of truth into their otherwise spectral narratives and this they skillfully did with the admission that the US and Pakistan cooperated on the raid. As I noted in this space when the the initial fiction broke, the idea that a convoy of helicopters could fly hundreds of miles into Pakistani airspace, moreover into very sensitive military areas, then to experience a crash of one aircraft, then conduct an assault, then to make it all the way out again without being detected was an absolute absurdity.

So now they have so thoroughly muddied the waters that it will be difficult for anyone to extract the truth. What remains clear is that the story they told was extremely dubious, and they have not offered a single, microscopic bit of evidence in its support. Until they do, I'm a Abbottabad Truther.

Oh, and who is the author of this article?

Hillhouse is a former smuggler turned author who publishes the national security blog, The Spy who Billed Me. She has credibility enough that she has been featured in the New York Times (if that's what gives one credibility), was granted an exclusive interview by the head of Blackwater, and in 2007 discovered the budget of the U.S. national intelligence community in metadata she found inside a declassified PowerPoint presentation, which caused quite a stir.


Smuggler turned national security blogger, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?



http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/dispatches-afpak/the-story-how-bin-laden-was-found-fiction