Part of Seymour Hersh’s story gets corroborated

Remember how I said that Seymour Hersh’s big Osama bin Laden story was interesting but needed some serious corroboration before it could really be considered a serious challenge to the official version of events? Well, here’s some corroboration, from Carlotta Gall of the New York Times:

The latest contribution is the journalist Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word article in The London Review of Books, which attempts to punch yet more holes — very big ones — in both the Obama administration’s narrative and the Pakistani government’s narrative. Among other things, Hersh contends that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military-intelligence agency, held Bin Laden prisoner in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that “the C.I.A. did not learn of Bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.”

On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.

Two years later, when I was researching my book, I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After the book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI.

NBC News also reported Monday that Bin Laden’s whereabouts were given to the US by a Pakistani intelligence officer, and that the ISI knew where Bin Laden was. Pakistan’s newspaper The News went so far as to name the ISI walk-in who gave the information to the Americans.

The flip side here is that this is the part of Hersh’s narrative that people had the least difficulty believing. The idea that Bin Laden chose to hide in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s version of West Point, NY, and that he was able to stay hidden there, has always seemed pretty outrageous. Hersh claims that he was there in Pakistani custody, but whether he was there as a Pakistani prisoner or as a guest of Pakistani intelligence (or some faction within Pakistani intelligence) isn’t all that big a difference — either way he was probably there under some duress and without the freedom to leave.

But still, revelations like this point to the fact that the official story of the Bin Laden raid is still brimming with questions and inconsistencies, and ought to raise people’s skepticism around that version of events In general. What they also do is further make it clear that torture enhanced interrogation had, contrary to that official narrative, played no role in finding Bin Laden, something that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report also showed. If some Pakistani ISI guy came in off the street to tell us where Bin Laden was hiding so he could get his hands on that $25 million reward, then I’m pretty sure stress positions and waterboarding weren’t involved.