This will be a brief Weekender. It consists of a reading assignment. Please find and read or reread Seymour Hersh’s “The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” first published by The London Review of Books in May 2015 and then the following year in Hersh’s book of the same name published by Verso.

I’ve referred to it before, most recently in “Update, 9-8-21” (click HERE for it). But while rereading Hersh’s 10,000-word piece yesterday and today I realized anew how seemingly comprehensive and revealing a piece of reporting it is.

What got me to look at it again was the first of dozens of references Webster Griffin Tarpley makes to bin Laden in the fifth edition of his book 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA (2011). It comes at the end of this passage on page 14:

“The post-9/11 hysteria was successfully redirected by the neocons to motivate the infamous US attack on Iraq of March 2003. . . . With [President] Obama’s West Point speech of December 2009, the Afghanistan war has been officially expanded to include a war against the nuclear power Pakistan. This war has been further accentuated in the spring of 2011 by the much touted elimination of Osama bin Laden, who in reality has been dead for almost a decade.”

What?

It appears that people interested in truths behind the September 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars launched by the United
States might want to read the 2011 Tarpley book and compare what he says against what Hersh does four years later, and how both of them say it.

— Mark Channing Miller