05/19/15 – Gareth Porter – The Scott Horton Show

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I got Gareth Porter on the line, and he's got one criticizing Seymour Hersh's new article.
It's at Truthout.
It's called The Big Misfire.
Nope.
It's called The Misfire in Hersh's Big Bin Laden Story.
Welcome back to the show.
Gareth, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks, Scott.
Glad to be back.
I mentioned that you wrote a book called Manufactured Crisis about how the Iranians never were making nuclear weapons, and how all the information otherwise is all a bunch of hype and or lies, and how people just don't need to really worry about that, because you did.
It's a very good book.
Thanks, Scott.
No, you haven't mentioned that, but now you have.
Yes.
Manufactured Crisis is what it's called.
It's for sale at Amazon.com and, you know, otherwise other places too.
Okay.
So The Big Misfire in Hersh's ...
I keep saying that.
The Misfire in Hersh's Big Bin Laden Story.
Now, there are a lot of asserted facts in Hersh's Big Bin Laden Story, and you're not taking on the whole story.
What all are you not taking on here?
What all are you focusing on exactly first?
Right.
Let me just begin by sort of putting this whole ... my article in perspective, which has to start with Cy Hersh and my understanding, my view of Cy's work.
I mean, you know, I have to begin by saying that I am a great admirer of Cy Hersh.
He's a role model for anybody who's interested in investigative journalism in this country or any country for that matter.
He's a man of integrity, and he's a man who I know very well, not that I'm a close friend or anything.
I know him somewhat, but I'm not ...
I can't call myself a friend in the sense of somebody who is in frequent conversation with him, but I know that he is a man who is motivated by a very powerful sense of right and wrong.
He knows that the United States has been guilty of great crimes over the years, and he has been doing his best to unmask those crimes, and so that's the starting point.
And I do indeed point out in my article at the very beginning that he unmasks the lies about the raid that was carried out to kill bin Laden, you know, pointing out a whole series of outright falsehoods surrounding that.
So that's the starting point.
Well, let me say, too, that I don't have you on as part of the big media pile-on against Hersh.
I interviewed him the other day, tried to let him have his say and get to the bottom of my questions as best as I could with him, and the only reason I have you on to do this is because I know you only care about the truth, and that's why you're willing to write this despite the fact that you have all this respect for him that you just mentioned.
So that's why we're even doing this in the first place, obviously.
Let me just add one more comment, if I may, which is the sort of the surrounding concept that I began with, which is that whether one comes to one's opposition to the terrible things that the United States does in the world and the terrible cost to the American people themselves from the left or from the right, from a traditional perspective that's associated with left or right, I feel that it's terribly important not to be hung up by some sense of, you know, we have to support any story that seems to fall in line with our views automatically without really doing our best to try to learn what the facts are.
And I think that problem arises frequently, and I think my view, as you, I think, quite accurately stated is that we have to go for the truth.
We have to do our best to identify what what has actually happened.
And that's what I did in the story.
All right.
So now let's get to it.
What are you challenging exactly then?
Well, the challenge that I put forward in my in my article to what was in Cy Hersh's article is that that he, you know, had an interview with a senior former intelligence official, unidentified, of course, in which the the former official told him that the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence Organization of the Pakistani military, which is indeed the the intelligence organization of Pakistan, knew all along that bin Laden was ensconced in this compound in the military enclave, Abbottabad, not not terribly far from Islamabad and very much a place where the Pakistani military had a lot of presence.
Their military academy was there.
The you know, there was a large military presence.
Military intelligence was there and so forth.
But what what Hersh was told and what he puts forward in his article is that the ISI or the Pakistani military actually captured bin Laden in an operation.
I think he puts it around 2006, if I remember correctly, and brought him to Abbottabad and installed him there, that that was entirely an ISI operation from the beginning, that he was held essentially captive in some kind of house arrest arrangement, but carefully watched over by the ISI from the beginning.
And that's the part of the story that I can say with with very great confidence is simply wrong.
And the reason is that three years ago, I did a piece for Truthout, which laid out a very detailed account of how bin Laden ended up in Abbottabad, which shows that, in fact, the process was one in which he had lost the confidence of the al-Qaeda shura and that they had made the decision to essentially move him far away from where they held their regular meetings so that his influence would be essentially would disappear because, A, he was a he was a security risk to them because he couldn't walk.
He couldn't move around.
And they felt that they would be better off if he were farther away from from where they were located.
And secondly, and by no means less consideration, lesser consideration was that he was advocating things that they believed were dangerous to al-Qaeda, primarily according to the account that that I publish in this article, because he was advocating that that al-Qaeda should attack a military base which involved nuclear nuclear research and which he said that the al-Qaeda must attack and take over, despite the fact that it was extremely well guarded and it was impregnable, according to the al-Qaeda leadership.
And the reason that I was able to put this down in the in the article in 2012 is that a former retired brigadier general of the Pakistani army, Shaukat Qadir, who is a friend of mine, I met him on two occasions in Pakistan, gotten to know him and and trust him because I know that he is independent.
He is a seeker after truth.
He he spent months of his own time independently trying to figure out what happened with regard to the whole bin Laden hit and was able to take advantage of a number of contacts that he had made when he was in the Pakistani army as a brigadier general and had served in South Waziristan.
And so some of his former tribal contacts were able to steer him to people who had served as couriers for a tribal militant named Baitullah Masood, leader of the Masood tribe in South Waziristan, and who actually had served as go-betweens between Baitullah Masood and the second in command of the of al-Qaeda Zawahiri.
So so they were in a very good position to tell him what was really going on.
And long story short, this this account makes it very clear that he was in Abbottabad because his the guy was serving as bin Laden's courier believed that that was the safest place for him.
All right.
Well, I'll have to ask you why you believe that right after this break.
Hold tight, everybody.
It's Gareth Porter at Truthout dot org.
The misfire in Hirsch's big bin Laden story.
We'll be right back.
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All right.
So here's the I'm online with Gareth Porter.
We're talking about his article, the misfire in Hirsch's big bin Laden story.
So Hirsch says that the ISI, that's the Pakistani CIA, basically, in more ways than one, I guess.
A lot of the time, anyway, that they had captured bin Laden back in 2006.
They were keeping him in Abbottabad under house arrest there until a rogue ISI official went and walked in and told the CIA where he was in exchange for the money.
And Gareth says not so.
Actually, it was not the ISI that put him there.
It was Al Qaeda that put him there.
And ISI didn't know about it.
And Gareth has a source and his source has a name.
It's Shaukat Qadir, who I've interviewed on the show before.
I forget about what now.
Maybe it was about the murder of Salim Shahzad back then.
Gareth, I forget.
But anyway, so he's a former general, I believe, not of the ISI, just of the military.
And he's written an entire book about the raid Operation Geronimo.
And and Gareth, you're saying you find his story that much more compelling.
Help me understand why it makes sense for Al Qaeda to put their boss.
I understand them wanting to kick him upstairs and make him the, you know, El Presidente or whatever, without any real power or whatever.
But why put him in Abbottabad, which is, you know, they say the neighborhood adjacent to the Pakistani West Point.
That's the $64 question, if you will, that I think everybody in the news media has been puzzled by, understandably, because it does seem to be counterintuitive, to say the least.
But the explanation, I think, is very clear that when they decided, as you put it appropriately, to kick bin Laden upstairs in the sense of removing him physically from the rest of the leadership of the Shura, of the Al Qaeda, the leadership group.
What what they had in mind originally, at least the person who was in charge of of moving bin Laden, of relocating him, was to to go to a place, a city called Mardan, which is located closer to Waziristan and farther, of course, away from from Islamabad and from the military academy at Abbottabad.
But what what Shaukat Qadir found out from his sources in the tribal area who were very well informed about this is that the the guy who had been the courier for bin Laden, who was advising the the leadership on what to, you know, how to how to do this relocation, said, don't go to Mardan.
The reason is that the place is crawling with intelligence people who are looking for terrorists.
And that's because there are indeed a number of Al Qaeda people active in that area.
So that's why the feeling was it was much more secure to to move to Abbottabad because there was no known Al Qaeda activity there.
There was no real there was a there was a small detachment of ISI, but they were not really active on counterterrorism stuff.
And that that was considered to be the place which would be easiest for him to hide.
And in fact, everything that I have seen indicates that that was the case, that that they simply didn't look.
They weren't expecting that bin Laden would be in a place like that.
So it was hiding him, in a sense, in plain sight, but in a place that was much more secure from from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence agencies as well as ISI.
And then so I don't think anybody who's not an idiot ever believed the story about the burial at sea.
But so what do you think really happened there?
Well, I have no idea precisely, but but I have no trouble believing Si Hirsch's account that that he was simply the body was simply dumped from the air somewhere or just simply buried, more likely, you know, unceremoniously, to say the least.
The idea of the burial at sea is is one of the more almost obscenely unbelievable tales that have come out of the either Obama administration or any other U.S. administration.
I mean, really, a bunch of SEALs joshing around and throwing his hands out the window and saying, oh, oops, my finger slipped or whatever.
And that that's actually more believable than the burial at sea to me.
It is more believable.
But but in any case, I mean, you know, the whole idea that there was any effort to give him an Islamic burial is just it doesn't pass the laugh test.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
When I interviewed Hirsch about it, I said, well, you say in your article that you sure seem to say that he didn't go to the Vinson at all.
He was last seen in the custody of the CIA, not the military.
And then he said, I didn't say that.
He was on the Vinson.
All right.
I said, what?
And then he had to go.
Yeah.
He never really clarified.
He he probably doesn't really have the details of that.
And he was going on sort of a general say so.
So, I mean, I think that's a that's an area of some ambiguity.
Either that or the copy editor screwed him, which can happen.
Yeah.
You know, but but but I just want to say you're you were right in in pointing out that the key problem here with or a key problem with with Cyrus's account based on his CIA or XCI source is that essentially the CIA was making up yet another tale to explain how they knew about the the compound in Abbottabad.
The first one having been that that they had been able to get enough information from their enhanced interrogation techniques of Al Qaeda detainees to to get on the trail of bin Laden's courier.
And, you know, I think I effectively demolished that that story and the and the related story, which was that they had a an intercept of a telephone conversation between the courier and somebody else, which helped them to follow the courier to Abbottabad.
And that combination of lies, I think, is very effectively refuted by what Shokat Qadir was able to find out, which is that that ISI began to investigate the Abbottabad compound because the owner, who was in fact bin Laden's courier, but who they had no idea who the identity, the real identity was, was telling people that he had made money on trading foreign currency.
And so they did a routine check to check out his story.
And it turned out that they couldn't find anybody who was trading currency in in wherever it is, the city in in Waziristan or near Waziristan.
And so so they continue their investigation, finally found that it just didn't check out.
And they began to become suspicious.
And they that's when in mid 2010, July 2010, people who'd been doing the investigation contracted the counter terrorism outfit in ISI and said, we think you should ask the CIA to do surveillance of this, meaning satellite or and or drone surveillance.
Of the compound.
And that sort of coincides then with the timing of when the CIA claims that they had this intercept and they were on the top of the case.
You mean to say it's not true that it was NSA surveillance and CIA torture that saved the day?
I'm shocked.
I got to.
Exactly.
I'm sorry for the diversion onto the burial at sea.
I just want to see what you would say.
But great interview.
Great reporting.
Thanks, Garrett.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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