That's a very good point that Seymour Hersh makes. President Obama's immediate announcement of the U.S. murder of Bin Ladin--on political advice that he take advantage of the situation to get re-elected in 2012--despite double-crossing the Pakistani generals who had helped bring it about (who had asked for a week to 10 days to prevent massive jihadist riots)--is shocking, to say the least.
I don't remember if those riots occurred but there were no doubt consequences to the PK government as word got out that they had held bin Ladin prisoner for some years (funded by the Saudi government, our, um, 'ally') and had allowed the Americans to assassinate him. And we don't know what the consequences will be to us (or, say, to India, or even Israel) as to keeping track of PK's nuclear weapons. Hersh says our side (meaning the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, I think) are extremely worried about those weapons.
Anyway, though Hersh IS a brilliant journalist--and I've read many of his writings--and is very plugged in to very good sources--he sometimes leaves me very unsatisfied. For instance, in this interview, he describes the jihadists who allegedly took down the Twin Towers in derisive terms--almost a clown show--and U.S. "preparedness" as a joke (many of the jihadist 'clowns' were known to intelligence agencies, for instance, he says). But I don't think he's ever asked why the U.S. was so unprepared. I mean, look who was in charge: a cokehead president and two very evil men, Cheney and Rumsfeld, who espoused the Neo-Con bible, "The Project for a New American Century," which states that Neo-Con plans for world domination need a "new Pearl Harbor" to mobilize the U.S. for their "Project."
Hersh sees the facts but doesn't connect the dots. Well, he probably CAN'T do so--even if he was inclined to--because there would end his career. It's the deepest, darkest secret of all--why we were so unprepared--and even hinting at it would dry up his sources instantly, and his book publishing and everything else. He would be finished. I guess I can understand that.
Another area he never gets into (that I know of) is U.S. funding and arming of jihadists all over the world--inadvertently or deliberately and covertly as with bin Ladin and Al Qaeda, or the various "rebels" in Syria--and the utter Garden of Eden of money for war profiteers that this new threat is used to justify. We rush weapons to Libya and Syria and they end up in IS's hands. This happens over and over again. The Bush junta "lost" a billion dollars in Iraq and you can bet that money is still funding violent jihadists. It's a crazy merry-go-round. And then there are the USAID-type profiteers soaking up billions of dollars for NOT "re-building" Afghanistan or Iraq (and now add Libya). The whole system of U.S. militarism and interventionism is a colossal racket. And it seems like everything we do just motivates more hatred and violent jihad in the countries we have stomped on and around the world.
I guess what I'm saying is that Hersh buys into the system too much. He accepts its terms. He treats it all as a relatively honest fight against extremist violence. But in so many cases, the U.S. itself is guilty of extreme violence with major "collateral damage" (hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, and yet more displaced). And the war profiteering is so extreme and so debilitating to most of our people. Hersh is not political in that way, and I wish he was. Our system of militarism abroad and poverty at home sucks to the max.
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