Osama Death Hoax : Mark Bowden's Revenge

In the Vanity Fair article, "There’s Just One Problem with Those Bin Laden Conspiracy Theories "
Mark Bowden, author of "Black Hawk Down" and "The Finish", takes aim at Sy Hersh and other "conspiracy theorists" who challenge the OBL death narrative.

"Seymour Hersh arrived late to the game, bringing with him an unmatched reputation for investigative coups—from My Lai to Abu Ghraib—and a scrappy anti-establishment attitude. His two sources told him a different tale. But for his to be true, every one of my sources was lying. And not just my sources, but those for Bergen, Schmidle, and others, too. Also the two SEALs who have told their own versions of the raid. All of them had to be in on the lie".

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/mark-bowden-bin-laden-capture-conspiracy

Update - Peter Bergen Takes Shots at NYT and Hersh

Excerpt from

"The New York Times triples down on bizarre bin Laden story"
by
Peter Bergen

Last week the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story headlined, "What Do We Really Know about Osama bin Laden's Death?"

In the story, Times reporter Jonathan Mahler asserted that it was "impossible to know what was true and what wasn't" about the saga of the hunt for bin Laden and his death in Pakistan, a story that he asserted is now "floating somewhere between fact and mythology."

Mahler wrote at length about investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who authored a piece in May in the London Review of Books asserting that every element of the story of the hunt for bin Laden and his death that has been widely and exhaustively reported was false. Hersh maintained that the 2011 raid on the compound where bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan was not a firefight involving U.S. Navy SEALs, but instead was a piece of theater in which Pakistani officials gave bin Laden to the SEALs so that he could be executed.

....

"History can, of course, be revised based on new accounts that emerge (which happens all the time) but those changes need to be based on credible evidence, which Hersh hasn't provided.

Mahler and his editors at the New York Times Magazine seem to have embraced the postmodern view that instead of practicing journalism or history in which you do the best to ferret out the truth, you only have competing "narratives" like Hersh's, each of which is worthy of serious attention. This is the kind of thing you might be taught in an undergrad course in literary theory, but is hardly what you expect from the "newspaper of record."

 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/24/opinions/bergen-times-triples-down-bin-laden-story/index.html

Bergen talks a good game

I read Manhunt and watched the HBO doc based on his book. The narrative was all about super dedicated intel agents at Alec Station who warned the White House. After 9/11 they felt guilty even though the real blame was with the dumbass politicians who ignored their warnings. Torture was a good faith effort to prevent the next attack and find Bin Laden.

This is good journalism?

Did Bergen explain in his book why the CIA protected al-Hazmi and al-MIhdhar from arrest? Is that not a question for a JOURNALIST? Did Bergen ever ask himself "Hmmm I'm a journalist and the CIA is telling me it made perfect sense to put human beings in coffin like boxes to get actionable intel. Maybe I should find out why if they were so freaked out about a possible al Qaeda attack in the summer of '01 it made sense to protect the guys that were associated with the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 Cole attack, the Yemen hub and KSM." His actual journalist explanation? The conduct was inexplicable. I'm not kidding. That is the what the greatest al Qaeda journalist of all time wrote in his book.

If Bergen cannot explain why al Qaeda operatives were protected when the system was blinking red then I'm sorry but I don't accept him as a credible journalist. The question that needs to be posed to every single US journalist is this: What was the CIA doing before 9/11 and why have you failed to get answers despite all your high level access and sources? Until that question is credibly answered journalists such as Bergen should rightly be viewed as practitioners of crap journalism.