Too good to be true? Sy Hersh and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden

By Craig Moorhead

NEW YORK - Seymour M. Hersh is one of the most prolific investigative journalists and political writers of our time. This fact is not disputed, but when writing his article "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" Hersh may have let his ambition get the better of him. In his lust to break the next big story he succumbed to temptation and compromised his investigative approach. As a result, Hersh inadvertently damaged his story's credibility with a controversial and unverifiable piece of reporting.

There are many ways to gauge the credibility of a story, such as looking at the number of sources the author uses, and asking questions about the nature of these sources. Is there a variety of sources to show that the author was thorough and complete in trying to obtain the information? Are the sources unnamed and if so does the story explain why they are not identified and how they know what they know? Hersh does well in these regards, he is very upfront about where the information is coming and his intensive effort to get to the bottom of things is well demonstrated.

However the article falls short in some other key areas. Another vital question to ask is the authority of the sources: is the author not only clear about what sources were used but is there information to help gauge their reliability? The authoritative nature of the people giving Hersh his information is made clear to the reader, these sources are current and former Pakistani government and military officials. They are of sufficient stature and responsibility that they would theoretically be privy to the information that they claim to posses. The problem is we have no way of assessing their honesty or integrity. While Hersh is so adamant that officials in the U.S. government are lying he seems blind to the obvious fact that there is just as much reason for his sources to lie as there is for those officials he accused of lying.

Understanding possible motives for why a source is willing to give you highly confidential and inflammatory information is essential to investigative reporting. Hersh all too freely offers up speciation for a motive behind the official story, Obama was in need of a 'win' and sound strategic basis to support his planed withdrawal of American forces from the Middle East. But he fails to make the same appraisal of the 'facts' of his own story.  The nagging question remains, why should we trust these sources and what did they stand to gain by contradicting the official U.S. testimony of the operation. My perception is that for every person he offers up, you can find many more who will tell you the opposite. There are countless U.S. officials who will offer the explanation that the Pakistanis, who were furious that the operation took place without being detected by them, were behind this false narrative as a way to save face. This seems just as likely a scenario as what Hersh suggests.

Documents are key elements of any investigation of this nature. In this case the documents are still classified, and we will probably never know exactly what happened. Until that changes, we are left in a battle of their word against ours. Rather than focusing on the exact details of the operation, I suggest the point to be focused on, is that the man responsible for the most devastating terrorist attack ever to occur on U.S. soil, is gone for good.

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