Seymour Hersh's bin Laden Story Lands in Washington With a Thud
A passer by looks at newspaper headlines reporting the death of Osama Bin Laden, in front of the Newseum, on May 2, 2011 in Washington, DC.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesSome pieces of journalism hit Washington like neutron bombs, scattering the political order, inspiring politicians to rethink what they know or ask for investigations. "The Killing of Osama Bin Laden," Seymour Hersh's lengthy alternate history of the eponymous 2011 operation, is not one of those. Critics of the Obama administration on the right and left, and in all factions of the Republican Party, are greeting the story with an awkward shrug. If there is any enthusiasm for an investigation of Hersh's charges–including the charge that the killing was actually a staged assassination, and that the story of the Abbottabad compound raid was a fiction–it has been well disguised.
"I've seen Seymour Hersh's piece," said Kentucky Senator Rand Paul in an interview with Bloomberg. "I don't think I have any particular information that either confirms or denies that piece. If I had information, I couldn't talk about it." When pressed as to whether he now doubted the story the Obama administration shared in 2011, Paul demurred. "I don't really have anything to confirm that, or really to have an opinion on it. I hate to make a conjecture on something I have no information on."