openpolitics.com

ON MAY 10, the London Review of Books published “The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” a 10,000-word piece by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh. The story argued that the official White House narrative of the al Qaeda leader’s killing was a fabrication. The intelligence blogger R. J. Hillhouse had made similar claims a few years earlier, which had gone largely ignored in the US. But these allegations came from the most celebrated investigative journalist of the past half-century — they received more attention. The number of people trying to read Hersh’s story online was enough to crash the LRB’s website, something their many articles on Greco-Roman numismatics had previously failed to do.

.. Signs of the new conformity appeared early in the 1990s with the closest precedent to l’affaire Hersh, the controversy over Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News. Webb, an adherent of the paranoid school of investigative journalism, alleged that money for the contras also flowed through CIA-sponsored drug dealing in California — suggesting that crack cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles had indirectly fueled the Nicaraguan civil war. Rather than follow up Webb’s reporting, which over time was revealed to be mostly accurate, journalists frenetically tried to discredit Webb, attacking his methods and his character. The subtext was clear: We don’t do this kind of thing anymore; the age of conspiracies has ended. Webb, ostracized and unable to find work at any major paper, eventually committed suicide.

.. This spring, Politico conducted a poll that found that 65 percent of White House correspondents believe Obama to be the “least press-friendly president they’ve ever seen,” a judgment echoed by former Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who called it “the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering.”

.. As Jeremy Scahill reported, an outcry persuaded Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh to sign an order for his release, but before that order could be delivered Saleh received a call from Obama, who said he would prefer that Shaye remain in prison. So Shaye remained in prison.

.. THE KEY DIFFERENCE between Hersh’s and Obama’s accounts of the bin Laden raid is that in the President’s version, everything went according to plan. Each element of the story seems calibrated for a political purpose: the heroism of the SEALs, the obsessive professionalism of the CIA analysts, and bin Laden’s respectful burial at sea, conducted in accordance with Islamic law.

.. The New Yorker ran an “as it happened” account of the raid (“Getting Bin Laden”) that gave readers the impression that reporter Nicholas Schmidle had been embedded with the SEALs, peering out through his own set of night-vision goggles, when in fact the whole thing was reconstructed from interviews; he hadn’t even talked to the SEALs.

.. Bin Laden’s death, widely seen as the most significant victory in what is now the fourteen-year history of the war on terror, is also the only sort of “victory” that the war on terror, with its diffuse aims and symbolic targets, could actually accomplish. Hersh stripped the war’s only conspicuous “success” of its halo, while also reminding the US public that the war it could not truly face was still taking place, behind much the same veil of lies and secrecy that characterized the more obvious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

..  In effect, it has attempted to do away with the idea that the country is conducting a war, technically subject to public approval via the legislative branch, and has put in place the hazier notion of a potentially endless chain of discrete war-resembling events overseen by a reluctant executive. In 2009, the administration asked the Pentagon to stop using the phrase “Global War on Terror,” favoring “Overseas Contingency Operations” instead, recasting the war as a series of ad hoc skirmishes.

.. The US is a country engaged in an endless global war that never feels like one. The government prefers to refuse to acknowledge this war; much of the media follows suit. In this respect, bin Laden’s killing is only the most notable instance of the open fabrications and legalistic half-truths that we’ve come to accept as inevitable parts of our public discourse.

.. It is fine to argue about the accuracy of Hersh’s individual claims, but his overarching one — that the White House’s account of the raid was an arrogant, lazy, and self-serving lie in a chain of arrogant, lazy, and self-serving lies — is something that most of us know, on some level, to be true.

.. Obama has been Uriah Heep–like in his professions of humility over the capacity of American war-making, but even as he has drawn down forces in one country, he has prosecuted smaller-scale wars in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, to say nothing of the continuing maneuvers in Afghanistan and Iraq and the enhanced NATO presence along the border with Russia. He does not make major speeches to the public about these wars, nor does he let Congress decide whether to fight them