Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. You can unlock the entire LRB archive for free for 24 hours by visiting LRB.com. UK forward slash open.

My name's Christian Lorenzen, editor at large for the LRB. I'm here with veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hirsch, talking about his new book with Verso, The Killing of Osama bin Laden.

So, Cy, you work in a form you call counter-narrative. How did you define that?

Let's first make it clear. You were my editor for all the pieces that were published in the London Review that I collected in this.

So you have a stake in being very nice to me.

That's true.

No, it's simply that.

I sometimes think I should say counter-truth because a narrative can be a fictional

narrative.

It's a weaker word.

But there is a truth and there's also another truth.

There's a truth that the president did go in and authorize the American SEALs, the kid, Osama bin Laden, and they did kill him.

That is a truth.

Everything else after that, how they played it, how they manipulated it, how they used it, how they managed to try to sell it as this is a turning point in the war and terror,

doesn't pass the smell test from the day one.

So I knew that.

And so it's all about critical thinking and what's sometimes we're supposed to learn in school,

which is, you know, theoretically, I'm lucky I went to University of Chicago where in the 50s where we had, we had courses called natural sciences, one, two, three, and four, social sciences, one, two, three, and four, humanities one, two, three and four, you read only the original works. And so you didn't have to look at a professor's, you didn't have to parrot what a professor,

you know, signing his own book to the students, and so that you have to pair it what he says.

You could actually go and do a riff on what you want.

So I think that helped me begin to think that the way to get a feel in Washington is actually read before you write.

And I mean that on a mega scale.

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