Normally I would be more skeptical. But the assertions Hersh is making about this is so far beyond the "official" narrative, you can't seriously think someone with Hersh's reputation would just make that up?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

Also worth weighing is that another reporter, R J Hillhouse, reported many of the same facts about the bin Laden raid shortly after it happened, to almost no attention[0]. However, she does not believe Hersh plagiarized her[1] (as Politico dubiously claimed, and she refuted), nor does she think that Hersh even had the same sources as her. She even noted that one of the more lurid details (dumping parts of Bin Laden's corpse out of the helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains) was one she had come across but did not report because she couldn't verify it.

This amounts to two serious, if heterodox, journalists coming to the same story about the Bin Laden raid independently. I'm convinced, personally, but I was already deeply jaded by the many retractions in the official story issued early on regarding the vital intelligence being arrived at by use of torture and mass surveillance, and what they cynically implied about State Department attitudes towards shaping public discourse.

[0] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...

[1] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...

The "report" you're referring to is a blog post, which appears to:

(a) confirm no sources

(b) never have been fact-checked

(c) received no editorial scrutiny

Its author is offended that Hersh didn't give credit for the following claims, which the blogger claims to have broken herself:

* The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction

* OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.

* The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden

* Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive

* The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden

* Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL

* Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid

* The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials

* The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed

But if you look carefully at these claims, you'll see that they're not particularly specific (the closest they get to "specific" is "knowing the names of two Pakistani generals who are so well-known they have Wikipedia pages"), have been corroborated nowhere, and, most importantly, are all predictable points in any narrative about Pakistan deliberately sheltering Bin Laden.

I think there's a reason nobody reported on Hillhouse originally.

Who said he made anything up? I think the conventional wisdom here is that he is just wrong.

Sure. I just have to ask: How wrong? 10% wrong? 40% wrong? 100% wrong? The dust up over the story begs the question. He can't be 100% wrong.

Sure he can. All he has to do is have too much faith in a source that puts him on the wrong narrative --- that Pakistan is deliberately harboring (and concealing) Osama Bin Laden. The rest of his claims fall into place from that, and they all make sense if that's what Pakistan is doing.

Why is Hersh having to publish some stories at LRB not more of an indictment of the New Yorker (et al) than Hersh? Hasn't the Obama administration been subject to curiously little investigative journalism?

Last question first: no.

Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.

Yes, that is the conclusion pushed in the usual organs. But the New Yorker had already published a bin-Laden assassination piece that supported the official narrative. Hersh himself says they (i.e. David Remnick) simply weren't interested in revisiting the story. Hersh further claims that he warned Remnick soon after the bin-Laden raid that the official story was being disputed by his sources and suggested he write a story, which Remnick countered with the suggestion of a blog article. (A blow-off?) If it's true that Hersh personally warned Remnick that the official story was problematic, the New Yorker publishing Nicholas Schmidle's story and passing on Hersh's looks to have less to do with fact-checking and more to do with editorial position. Since the New Yorker didn't want to buy, Hersh shopped the story elsewhere, which is simply how freelancers go about business. (It was actually the Washington Post that allegedly passed on the story because of "sourcing" standards.)

Hersh claims to have sold the story to LRB for the "politics" of it, the meaning of which is uncertain. But as he hopes to have a book published on the "war on terror", it is not out of the question that he selected them to establish rapport. And that he chose them, instead of resorting to them out of some kind of desperation owing to defects in the work itself, seems pretty clear.

[*] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/sy-hersh-bin-la...

[.] http://fpif.org/seymour-hersh-draws-even-criticism-lrb-new-y...

- edit -

The Obama administration is widely claimed by non-partisan journalists and journalist groups as being openly hostile toward the press and has used espionage provisions to prosecute officials deemed to have "leaked" inside information via the types of conversations that would previously have been considered business-as-usual. (Despite opening his presidency with rhetoric about being the most "open" and "transparent" administration in history.) This has resulted in administration staffers & officials being paralyzed and fearful of speaking with the press at all, stymieing journalists' attempts at effectively covering the government and acting as the fourth estate. While it is unfortunate that we cannot quantify whether one administration has experienced more or less scrutiny than others, blithely asserting to the contrary is not a reasonable position in this context.

[:] https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks...

There's a meme that Obama has been much harsher on whistleblowers than predecessors, but it falls apart on closer inspection:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813

The most important takeaway is that the sample size on leak prosecutions is very, very low, so happenstance alone can make a President look unusually hostile. Here, it's a combination of happenstance, a shift in media norms, and cases begun under the previous President.