Left: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 2, 2011
Seymour Hersh’s sensational article The Killing of Osama bin Laden, in the London Review of Book, accuses Obama and his White House of lying about the circumstance of Osama bin Laden’s killing. “The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” says Hersh.
Hersh’s long article refutes President Obama’s account as well as that of many members of his administration’s, but does not even mention Hillary Clinton. Why this omission?
Speaking at the U.S. Naval Academy on April 2012, then Secretary of State, Clinton hinted her contribution to the decision to kill bin Laden: “We did our very best to try to give the president our honest assessment. Ultimately it was his [Obama’s] decision. Which I fully supported because I believed that we had to take the risk – and it was a risk – that that large house in Abbottabad was the haven for Bin Laden.”
In her book, Hard Choices (2014), Hillary said: “Perhaps the most famous example from my four years as Secretary of State was President Obama’s order to send a team of Navy SEALs into a moonless Pakistani night to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The President’s top advisors were divided. The intelligence was compelling, but far from definitive. The risks of failure were daunting.” However, there are accounts of Hillary’s claim that she persuaded the hesitant President to risk the attack on “that house in Abbotabad,”
At the time, there were speculations that Hillary supported the attack because she wanted to atone for her husband’s 1998 decision not to kill bin Laden, despite a very good opportunity to do so. Had bin Laden been killed in 1998, perhaps al Qaeda’s 9/11 would have never happened.
So why doesn’t Hersh point out Hillary’s role?
Because Hersh’s story points out discrepancies in the President’s and other members of his Administration accounts of the killing of Osama, his omission of Clintons is glaring. This seems like an attempt to deflect attention from Hillary’s active role in yet another obfuscation of the truth by the Obama administration.
Stay tuned for Hersh’s next laundry tale.