Sy Hersh: Bin Laden Raid A Lie, Pro Obama Media Pathetic

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims that the timid US news media could be helping to put out a false narrative from the White House about the raid on Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Hersh, who writes for the New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in side of US presidents since the 1960s. He won the Pulitzer for reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and also reported extensively on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal during the Iraq War.

About the Obama administration’s version of the Bin Laden Navy SEAL covert operation in Pakistan and the 9/11 ringleader’s death, Hersh insisted in a Guardian interview that…

Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.”

He added that a report from a Pakistani commission about the bin Laden situation was “bulls**t.”

Hersh, 76, is writing a book about national security that in one chapter apparently will discuss what he thinks really happened at the bin Laden compound in Abottabad.

According to Hersh, Barack Obama’s policies are worse than those of his presidential predecessor George W. Bush, but the media is incapable of any critical reporting unlike during the Bush administration:

It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].”

Added Hersh: “It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn’t happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.”

Singling out the the New York Times in particular, Hersh declared that the Times spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would.”

In addition to failing to call out Obama on the controversial drone program, Hersh identified other areas where he thinks the Obama-friendly media have been fallen down on the job. “Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?”

In addition to Hersh, other pundits on the left such as Noam Chomsky and Cornel West have publicly denounced the overseas deployment of lethal drones.

Given the lack of true investigative journalism these days, Hersh’s solutions include closing down news bureaus and starting over, and getting rid of “90 percent” of the editors in the mainstream media, and replacing them with more independent thinkers who aren’t in the pocket of the Obama administration.

The Five‘s Greg Gutfeld recently quipped that the US news media is so far in Obama’s pocket that they are choking on his lint.

Hersh suggested that the electronic surveillance revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden might be a game-changer for the media: “Editors love documents. Chicken-s**t editors who wouldn’t touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game.”

The Daily Caller pointed out that Hersh himself has been criticized for inaccurate reporting.

Do you think it’s plausible that the media is engaged in some kind of cover-up about the Osama bin Laden attack?

[image credit: Institute for Policy Studies]