The New Yorker passed on Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden story
Seymour Hersh's alternative history about the killing of Osama bin Laden was offered to and declined by The New Yorker, where Hersh is a regular contributor, years before its publication in the London Review of Books, the On Media blog has confirmed.
Hersh's 10,000-word article, which was published Sunday, alleges that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and sold him to the U.S. in 2010 for military aid. It also alleges that the Pakistanis insisted on staging the Abbottabad raid that took place in 2011. The article immediately drew criticism from U.S. officials and journalists alike. At Vox, Max Fisher noted that Hersh's allegations "are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened" and says the story "is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies."
Sources with knowledge of the matter said Monday that Hersh began pitching the magazine on the story years ago and that The New Yorker declined it on the grounds that it didn't hold up to scrutiny. The New Yorker similarly declined Hersh's 2013 article, also published in the London Review of Books, alleging that the Obama administration "cherry-picked intelligence” from the chemical attack in Syria in order to make the case for attacking President Bashar Assad.
Hersh did not respond to a request for comment; New Yorker editor David Remnick declined to comment.
The discrepancy between Hersh's landmark reporting -- he is responsible for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq -- are difficult to square with the tenuous, poorly sourced Syria and bin Laden reports. Hersh is at once a Pulitzer Prize-winning, George Polk-winning, National Magazine Award-winning reporter and, in the words of Vox's Fisher, a man who "has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails."
Hersh has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1993. His most recent article for the magazine, a remembrance of the My Lai massacre, was published in late March.