And so, when I read the New York Times article alleging that the "truth" about the Bin Laden killing might be more than meet the eye, I thought it's just about how everyone might be trying to fine-tune their position for and against going in for the kill, particularly those like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in this pre-election season. I have not expected the Rashomon type of split reality, with different people now peddling their stories (books, essays, movies, public statements, you name it) while challenging the versions of reality from others' stories.
I knew about the couple of memoir books (like the ex-SEAL's first hand account of the events) and movie (Zero Dark Thirty). But I was not aware of the 10336-word essay from Seymour Hersh about some conspiracy theory behind the Bin Laden killing. For what it's worth (and I'm glad the publishing of this essay was done online so that it has not wasted any papers that the essay is printed on), all the supposed lies and deceit, the conspiracy theory and the alternative "story" that the essay is trying to spin, is decidedly underwhelming.
Where should I begin...
No doubt that, with four years of his life spent on digging stuffs up, Hersh is more than eager to juice us every little minutiae details, inconsistency, half-truth, and outright lies about the official version from the White House. Cover-ups make even better story, and usually that sells. It is thus that I'm surprisingly uninterested in the minor details of this whole operations.
Do I really care how America came to locate Bin Laden, that it's supposed to be from some walk-in informant interested in the $25m bounty, rather than painstaking intelligence gathering by CIA? Not really.
Do I really care if Pakistan knows about the operations? No, I don't.
Do I really care if the SEAL's have standing kill order of Bin Laden that would take no prisoner? I'm glad they did the kill. That should have been the first goddamn goal of the whole mission because, heck, why would we want to take Bin Laden captive and then having to attend to all his needs with some five-star treatment since doing anything otherwise would have brought all those human rights lawyers jumping up and down, all while wasting taxpayers money on it that can be better spent elsewhere.
Do I really care how the body of Bin Laden was disposed? Well, if I don't care if he's killed (and yes, I want to see him killed), then why should I care if he gets a proper burial or not (which I don't)?
Do I really care if the White House juice up the story? Everyone loves a good story, and the White House version isn't as dramatic as the one in Zero Dark Thirty anyways. So, maybe Obama isn't that bad a screenwriter when it comes to wanting to look like a courageous leader making gutsy choices (that George W Bush failed to make), but one would argue that anyone in Obama's shoes would have done the same.
Everything else, like the corroboration with the Pakistanis in ISI, is just business as usual (horse trading in geopolitics). No one is interested in those either.
All in all, that very long, very verbose essay from Hersh just feels tiresome, all with the hope of finding a story behind something that no one really cares much about anymore. The main objective to kill Bin Laden was achieved, that's what everyone is focused on, and that's what matters. There might be differences in accounting for the how, but never the why.
Hersh argues so much about the truth. but his essay's heavy reliance on conjecture and accounts from "one retired official" and not much validation is not that confidence-inspiring. Maybe some days more details will filter out, but we have to ask ourselves, if we don't care about it now, not even the supposedly "shocking" truth from Hersh, do we care for much else (eg. whether Pakistan has tipped off US on this operation and the whereabouts of Bin Laden)? I highly doubt it.
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