Seymour Hersh’s inconvenient truths

Philip Giraldi has a nice—nice, if redundant—piece in the American Conservative pointing out that Seymour M. Hersh’s recent piece in the London Review of Books, “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” is likely to be a lot more accurate than the mainstream media, which somehow resent being told that the US government doesn’t always tell the truth, will admit. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Trevor Trimm takes after the media’s convenient skepticism here.

Is it hard to believe that some of our “allies,” like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, didn’t want the U.S. to find Osama, for fear of what he might say?¹ Hard to believe that some people in the Pakistani government knew where Osama was? Hard to believe that someone might sell him out, on condition that all the details of the arrangement be kept secret? Hard to believe that the U.S. government might not want to know what Osama could tell them about Saudi involvement in al Qaeda, and thus found it far more convenient to kill him rather than bring him to “justice”?²

The recent media kerfuffle over Jeb Bush’s inability to give the “correct” answer on the war in Iraq—“in hindsight a mistake but justified on the basis of the evidence then available”—demonstrates how reluctant the mainstream media is to admit that the U.S. government will deliberately deceive the people it supposedly serves on a major issue. Never mind the fact that we were lied into Vietnam, lied into Iraq (twice!), lied into “Afghanistan II”, Obama’s “good war”, which we have now “lost” without noticing, because losing it cost us nothing, and lied into Libya as well, about which everyone in Washington except Rand Paul remains speechless.

Afterwords
I’ve wailed and whaled on this issue frequently in the past, most recently here. James Fallows has more here and links to additional skeptics as well.