Gareth Porter’s Comments on Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story

Gareth Porter confirms most of Seymour Hersh’s story about bin Laden’s murder in 2011 (see also this very important and detailed article by him from May 3, 2012.)

Porter’s confirmation of the 2011 death accompanies his significant correction or replacement of one part of Hersh’s account. Porter discounts the walk-in theory of how information about bin Laden’s whereabouts reached Obama, and that in turn discounts the theory that ISI harbored bin Laden under house arrest. He replaces this story with hard evidence obtained by “Retired Pakistani Brigadier General Shaukat Qadir, who spent months investigating the bin Laden raid and the bin Ladens’ relocation to Abbottabad…”

Porter’s account says that the al Qaeda leadership exiled bin Laden to Abbottabad. Furthermore, “Qadir also learned from interviewing ISI officials that, by mid-2010, they had become suspicious about the owner of the Abbottabad compound, of a possible terrorism connection, as a result of what began as a routine investigation, although they did not know that bin Laden was there. Five different junior and mid-level ISI officers told Qadir they understood Pakistan’s Counter Terrorism Wing (CTW) had decided to forward a request to the CIA for surveillance of the Abbottabad compound in July 2010.”

According to Porter, no walk-in to the CIA and no ISI house arrest of bin Laden occurred, while he provides a new account of how bin Laden came to be in Abbottabad based on Qadir’s extensive interviews.

The weight of the evidence, specifically the details provided by Porter, switch me into his camp. But no matter how you slice it, Hersh or Porter both provide evidence and accounts against the Obama story and against the theory that bin Laden died in 2001.

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10:06 am on May 19, 2015