Bin Laden refused the British offer. Four days later he was assassinated.
Since then"--"as official Pentagon and other sources confirm"--"the West's allies, the Gulf states and Turkey, deliberately sponsored al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria to hijack the revolution and destabilise the Assad regime, a strategy that was covertly supported by the West in 2012, but now openly admitted.
US government officials have scrambled to conceal the facts around the bin Laden raid.
They hope to suppress public recognition that the primary factor in bin Laden's ability to oversee al-Qaeda until 2011 was US collusion with his state-sponsors, for short-sighted geopolitical purposes.
Hersh's critics, for the most part, have taken issue with his heavy reliance on anonymous sources. As that makes the story supposedly unverifiable, contradictions between Hersh's narrative and other Known Facts in the 'war on terror' Official History mean that Hersh's narrative must be false.
There is one big problem with this response: Hersh was not the first to break the story.
US national security journalist Dr. Raelynn Hillhouse, a former University of Michigan political scientist and Fulbright scholar who has broken a number of exclusive stories on the privatisation of the US intelligence community, punched holes in the Obama administration's narrative of the bin Laden raid before Hersh. At that time, her story was blacked out by the US media, but picked up elsewhere such as The Telegraph and New Zealand Herald.
In August 2011, in a series of articles on her national security blog, Dr. Hillhouse cited senior unidentified sources in the US intelligence community who told her that the US government had received notice of bin Laden's whereabouts from a Pakistani ISI informant, seeking the $25 million State Department reward. Hillhouse's sources said that "the Saudis were paying off the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) to essentially shelter and keep bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad."
What happened then according to Hillhouse's sources only raises further questions:
"The CIA offered them a deal they couldn't refuse: they would double what the Saudis were paying them to keep bin Laden if they cooperated with the US. Or they could refuse the deal and live with the consequences: the Saudis would stop paying and there would be the international embarrassment."
The upshot, Hillhouse reported, is that the ISI and Pakistani military cooperated with the US on the bin Laden raid.
In an interview with The Intercept, Hillhouse confirmed that it seemed clear her sources were different to those who had spoken to Hersh, as they did not consult for US Special Operations Command.
She also said that her own sources had independently confirmed the same facts to her about the disposal of bin Laden's remains over the Hindu Kush"--"except that she had decided not to mention this as she couldn't corroborate it at the time. Hersh's reporting provided that corroboration.
But the person who first broke this story was neither Hersh, nor Hillhouse. Just days after the raid, former CIA and State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson cited active intelligence sources who told him:
"The US Government learned of bin Laden's whereabouts last August when a person walked into a US embassy and claimed that Pakistan's intelligence service (ISI) had bin Laden under control in Abottabad, Pakistan" The claim that we found bin Laden because of a courier and the use of enhanced interrogation is simply a cover story."
Johnson also confirmed that US intelligence had "learned that key people in Saudi Arabia were sending Pakistan money to keep Osama out of sight and out of trouble." He also adds some other interesting details, notably that Leon Panetta, then CIA director, ensured that all intelligence leading up to the operation was highly compartmentalised, and fed directly to him.
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