{"id":72480,"date":"2016-04-25T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=72480"},"modified":"2016-04-22T15:38:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T14:38:17","slug":"seymour-hersh-dishes-on-saudi-oil-money-bribes-and-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/04\/seymour-hersh-dishes-on-saudi-oil-money-bribes-and-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden\/","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Hersh Dishes on Saudi Oil Money Bribes and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Seymour<\/a>

Seymour Hersh<\/p><\/div>\n

A wide-ranging interview tied to his new book, <\/em>The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.<\/em><\/p>\n

20 Apr 2016 – <\/em>Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist who is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his article exposing the My Lai massacre by the U.S. military in Vietnam. More recently, he exposed the U.S. government\u2019s abuse of detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison facility.<\/p>\n

Hersh’s new book, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden<\/em><\/a>, is a corrective to the official account of the war on terror. Drawing from accounts of a number of high-level military officials, Hersh challenges a number of commonly accepted narratives: that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in Ghouta; that the Pakistani government didn\u2019t know Bin Laden was in the country; that the late ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in a solely diplomatic capacity; and that Assad did not want to give up his chemical weapons until the U.S. called on him to do so.<\/p>\n

Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private individuals or both?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn\u2019t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that\u2019s my best guess), because he would\u2019ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don\u2019t know anything really about 9\/11. We just don\u2019t know. We don\u2019t know what role was played by whom.<\/p>\n

KK: So you don\u2019t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: The money was from the government \u2026 what the Saudis were doing, so I\u2019ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven\u2019t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That\u2019s really a lot of money.\"military<\/a><\/p>\n

KK: For the Bin Laden compound?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: Yeah, in exchange for being quiet. The Paks traditionally have done security for both Saudi Arabia and UAE.<\/p>\n

KK: Do you have any idea how much Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan in hush money?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: I have been given numbers, but I haven\u2019t done the work on it so I\u2019m just relaying. I know it was certainly many\u2014you know, we\u2019re talking about four or five years\u2014hundreds of millions [of dollars]. But I don\u2019t have enough to tell you.<\/p>\n

KK: You quote a retired U.S. official as saying the Bin Laden killing was \u201cclearly and absolutely a premeditated murder\u201d and a former SEAL commander as saying \u201cby law we know what we\u2019re doing inside Pakistan is homicide.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you think Bin Laden was deprived of due process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: [Laughs] He was a prisoner of war! The SEALs weren\u2019t proud of that mission; they were so mad it was outed\u2026I know a lot about what they think and what they thought and what they were debriefed, I will tell you that. They were very unhappy about the attention paid to that because they went in and it was just a hit.<\/p>\n

Look, they\u2019ve done it before. We do targeted assassinations. That\u2019s what we do. They understood\u2014the SEALs\u2014that if they were captured by the Pakistani police authorities, they could be tried for murder. They understood that.<\/p>\n

KK: Why didn\u2019t they apprehend Bin Laden? Can you imagine the intelligence we could have gotten from him?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: The Pakistani high command said go kill him, but for chrissake don\u2019t leave a body, don\u2019t arrest him, just tell them a week later that you killed him in Hindu Kush. That was the plan.<\/p>\n

Many sections, particularly in the Urdu-speaking sections, were really very positive about Bin Laden. Significant percentages in some areas supported Bin Laden. They [the Pakistani government] would\u2019ve been under great duress if the average person knew that they\u2019d helped us kill him.<\/p>\n

KK: How did it hurt U.S.\/Pakistan relations when, as you point out in your book, Obama violated his promise not to mention Pakistan\u2019s cooperation with the assassination?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: We spend a lot of time with [Pakistani] generals Pasha and Kayani, the head of the army and ISI, the intelligence service. Why? Why are we so worried about Pakistan? Because they have [nuclear] bombs. … at least 100, probably more. And we want to think that they\u2019re going to share what they know with us and they\u2019re not hiding it.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t really know everything we think we know and they don\u2019t tell us everything\u2026 so when he [Obama] is doing that, he\u2019s really messing around with the devil in a sense.<\/p>\n

…. He [Bin Laden] had wives and children there. Did we ever get to them? No. We never got to them. Just think about all the things we didn\u2019t do. We didn\u2019t get to any of the wives, we didn\u2019t do much interrogation, we let it go.<\/p>\n

There are people that know much more about this and I wish they would talk, but they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

KK: You write that Obama authorized a ratline wherein CIA funneled arms from Libya into Syria and they ended up in jihadi hands. [According to Hersh, this operation was coordinated via the Benghazi consulate where U.S. ambassador Stevens was killed.] What was\u00a0Secretary of State\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u2019s role in this given her significant role in Libya?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: The only thing we know is that she was very close to Petraeus who was the CIA director at the time … she\u2019s not out of the loop, she knows when there\u2019s covert ops. … That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there\u2019s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.<\/p>\n

KK: In the book you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only\u2014nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.)\u00a0Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House\u2019s proposed strike had been carried out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: Do you really think that at any time this is discussed? You know who\u2019s sanest on this: Dan Ellsberg. When I first met Dan, it was way early\u2014in \u201970, \u201971, during the Vietnam War. I think I met him before the Pentagon Papers were around. I remember him telling me that he asked that question at a meeting while planning the war [regarding B-52 targets] and nobody had even looked at it.<\/p>\n

You really don\u2019t get a very good hard, objective look. You can see a movie in which they seem to do it, but that\u2019s not really so.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if [regarding Syria] they looked at collateral damage and noncombatants, but I do know that in wars in the past, that\u2019s never been a big issue. … you\u2019re talking about the country that dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki.<\/p>\n

KK: In a recent interview<\/a> with the\u00a0Atlantic, Obama characterized his foreign policy as \u201cDon\u2019t do stupid shit.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: I read the Jeff Goldberg piece\u2026and it of course drove me nuts, but that\u2019s something else.<\/p>\n

KK: As you point out in your book, Obama originally wanted to remove Assad. Isn\u2019t that the definition of stupid? The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups.<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: God knows I can\u2019t tell you why anybody does anything. I\u2019m not inside their head. I can tell you that the same question was asked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs\u2014Dempsey\u2014which is why I was able to write that story about their going, indirectly, behind his [Obama\u2019s] back because nobody could figure out why.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why we persist on living in the Cold War, but we do. Russia actually did a very good job. They not only did the bombing that was more effective than what we do, I think that\u2019s fair to say. Russia also did stuff that was sort of more subtle and more interesting: they renewed the Syrian army. They took many major units of the Syrian army offline, gave them R&R and re-equipped them. Got new arms, got a couple weeks off, then they came back, got more training and became a much better army.<\/p>\n

I think in the beginning, there\u2019s just no question, we wanted to get rid of Bashar. I think they misread the whole resistance. Wikileaks is very good on this\u2026there\u2019s enough State Department documents that show that from 2003 on, we really had a policy\u2014not very subtle, not violent, but millions of dollars given to opposition people. We certainly were not a nonpartisan foreign government inside Syria.<\/p>\n

Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period.<\/p>\n

One of the things that comes across just in the current stories about all the travails we\u2019re having about ISIS allegedly running all these terror teams in Brussels and in the suburbs of Paris\u2026 it\u2019s very clear, ironically, that one of the things France and Belgium (and a lot of other countries) did was after the Syrian civil war began, if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, \u2018Go, go, go\u2026 overthrow Bashar!\u2019<\/p>\n

So they actually pushed a lot of people to go. I don\u2019t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas. And they would spend four or five months, come back and do organized crime and get in jail and next thing you know they\u2019re killing people. There\u2019s a real pattern there.<\/p>\n

I do remember when the war began in 2003, our war against Baghdad, I was in Damascus working for The New Yorker then and I saw Bashar and one of the things he told me, he said, \u2018Look, we\u2019ve got a bunch of radical kids and if they want to go fight, if they want to leave the mosque here in Damascus and go fight in Baghdad, we said fine! We even gave them buses!\u2019<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s always been a tremendous, Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let\u2019s work together?<\/p>\n

KK: So why don\u2019t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational.<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: I don\u2019t know. I would also say, why wasn\u2019t the first door we knocked on after 9\/11, Russia\u2019s? They just had a terrible 10-year war with Chechnya. Believe me, the Chechen influence in the Sunni world in terms of jihadism is strong. For example I\u2019ve been told by my friends in the intelligence community that al-Baghdadi (who runs ISIS) is surrounded by a lot of guys with experience in Chechnya. A lot of people involved in that operation did.<\/p>\n

So who knows the most about jihadism? You look at it from the Russian point of view\u2014we never like looking at things from other people\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n

KK: In the book you quote a Joint Chiefs of Staff adviser who said that Brennan told the Saudis to stop arming the extremist rebels in Syria and their weapons will dry up\u2014which seems like a rational request\u2014but then, you point out, the Saudis ramped up arms support.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seymour Hersh: That\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

KK: Did the U.S. do anything to punish the Saudis for it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: Nothing. Of course not. No, no. I\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s going on right now … al Nusra, certainly a jihadist group\u2026 has new arms. They\u2019ve got some tanks now\u2014I think the Saudis are supplying stuff. They\u2019ve got tanks now, have a lot of arms, and are staging some operations around Aleppo. There\u2019s a ceasefire and even though they\u2019re not part of it, they obviously took advantage of the ceasefire to resupply. It\u2019s going to be bloody.<\/p>\n

KK: Just to be clear, the U.S. hasn\u2019t done anything to punish or at least disincentivize the Saudis from arming our enemies in Syria?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SH: Quite the contrary. The Saudis and Qatar and the Turks put money into those arms [sent to Syrian jihadis].<\/p>\n

You\u2019re asking the right questions. Do we say anything? No. Turkey\u2019s Erdogan has played a complete double game: for years he supported and accommodated ISIS. The border was wide open\u2014Hatay Province\u2014guys were going back and forth, bad guys. We know Erdogan\u2019s deeply involved. He\u2019s changing his tune slightly but he\u2019s been deeply involved in this.<\/p>\n

Let me talk to you about the sarin story [the sarin gas attack in Ghouta, a suburb near Damascus, which the U.S. government attributed to the Assad regime] because it really is in my craw.\u00a0 In this article that was this long series of interviews [of Obama] by Jeff Goldberg\u2026he says, without citing the source (you have to presume it was the president because he\u2019s talking to him all the time) that the head of National Intelligence, General [James] Clapper, said to him very early after the [sarin] incident took place, “Hey, it\u2019s not a slam dunk.”<\/p>\n

You have to understand in the intelligence community\u2014Tenet [Bush-era CIA director who infamously said Iraqi WMD was a \u201cslam dunk\u201d] is the one who said that about the war in Baghdad\u2014that\u2019s a serious comment. That means you\u2019ve got a problem with the intelligence. As you know I wrote a story that said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the president that information the same day. I now know more about it.<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s explanation for [not bombing Syria] was that the Syrians agreed that night, rather than be bombed, they\u2019d give up their chemical weapons arsenal, which in this article in the\u00a0Atlantic, Goldberg said they [the Syrians] had never disclosed before. This is ludicrous. Lavrov [Russia\u2019s Foreign Minister] and Kerry had talked about it for a year\u2014getting rid of the arsenal\u2014because it was under threat from the rebels.<\/p>\n

The issue was not that they [the Syrians] suddenly caved in. [Before the Ghouta attack] there was a G-20 summit and Putin and Bashar met for an hour. There was an official briefing from Ben Rhodes and he said they talked about the chemical weapons issue and what to do. The issue was that Bashar couldn\u2019t pay for it\u2014it cost more than a billion bucks. The Russians said, \u2018Hey, we can\u2019t pay it all. Oil prices are going down and we\u2019re hurt for money.\u2019 And so, all that happened was we agreed to handle it. We took care of a lot of the costs of it.<\/p>\n

Guess what? We had a ship, it was called the Cape Maid, it was parked out in the Med. The Syrians would let us destroy this stuff [the chemical weapons]\u2026 there was 1,308 tons that was shipped to the port\u2026and we had, guess what, a forensic unit out there. Wouldn\u2019t we like to really prove\u2014here we have all his sarin and we had sarin from what happened in Ghouta, the UN had a team there and got samples\u2014guess what?<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t match. But we didn\u2019t hear that. I now know it, I\u2019m going to write a lot about it.<\/p>\n

Guess what else we know from the forensic analysis we have (we had all the missiles in their arsenal). Nothing in their arsenal had anything close to what was on the ground in Ghouta. A lot of people I know, nobody\u2019s going to go on the record, but the people I know said we couldn\u2019t make a connection, there was no connection between what was given to us by Bashar and what was used in Ghouta. That to me is interesting. That doesn\u2019t prove anything, but it opens up a door to further investigation and further questioning.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Ken Klippenstein is an American journalist who can be reached on Twitter @kenklippenstein<\/a> or email: kenneth.klippenstein@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Seymour M. Hersh has been a contributor to <\/em>The New Yorker since 1993. He is a regular at <\/em>London Review of Books and is writing an alternative history of the war on terror. His journalism and publishing awards include a Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. Hersh won a National Magazine Award for Public Interest for his 2003 articles \u201cLunch with the Chairman,\u201d \u201cSelective Intelligence,\u201d and \u201cThe Stovepipe.\u201d In 2004 he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces; in 2005, he again received a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, an Overseas Press Club award, the National Press Foundation\u2019s Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism award, and his fifth George Polk Award, making him that award\u2019s most honored laureate. He lives in Washington DC.<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview was lightly edited for readability.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 alternet.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A wide-ranging interview tied to his new book, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}