Vox Sentences: Is the administration's Osama bin Laden story a lie?

1. Zero Dark Hershy

Osama Bin Laden's (alleged) compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (Getty Images)

• A blockbuster report from Seymour Hersh alleges that Pakistan captured Osama bin Laden in 2006, and let the US kill him in a stage-managed raid in exchange for military aid and concessions on Afghanistan.

  [London Review of Books / Seymour Hersh]

• The article, published in the London Review of Books, alleges that bin Laden was kept in Abbottabad by the Pakistani government, with Saudi financial help, and that Pakistan consented to an assassination dressed up as a raid after one of their own intelligence officials leaked bin Laden's whereabouts to the US.

  [BBC / Anthony Zurcher]

• Hersh claims the Obama administration agreed to say bin Laden was killed in a drone strike, but changed its story after a helicopter crashed during the mission and it concluded the story couldn't be contained.

• Hersh has a long career as an acclaimed investigative reporter, helping to uncover both the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.

  [New Yorker / Seymour Hersh]

• The bin Laden story has been a point of friction between Hersh and New Yorker editor David Remnick, who published a piece by Nicholas Schmidle backing the government version of the raid. It's notable that the New Yorker didn't publish Hersh's latest story.

  [New Republic / Isaac Chotiner]

• Hersh's story is very similar to one advanced in 2011 by security analyst Raelynn Hillhouse, who called Hersh's article "either plagiarism or unoriginal."

  [Slate / Joshua Keating]

• The claim that some in Pakistan knew where bin Laden was isn't new, or particularly implausible; people like the New York Times's Carlotta Gall have been reporting that for years.

  [NYT / Carlotta Gall]

• But that's a very different idea than the notion, advanced by Hersh, that bin Laden was under de facto house arrest.

  [Christian Science Monitor / Dan Murphy]

• Max Fisher: the Hersh theory makes no sense. For one thing, US-Pakistani relations were strained following the raid, the opposite of what you'd expect after a deal.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

2. 42 months

The floor at CIA headquarters. (Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

• Former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted in January of giving a reporter information about a botched operation targeting Iran's nuclear program, has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail.

  [NYT / Matt Apuzzo]

• That's far less than the 19-to-24-year range federal sentencing guidelines suggest, and for which prosecutors had argued.

  [The Intercept / Peter Maass]

• But it's a whole lot more than the 0 years, 0 months, and 0 days former CIA director David Petraeus received for leaking classified information to his paramour.

  [WSJ / Ken Otterbourg and Andrew Grossman]

• James Risen, the New York Times reporter Sterling leaked to, was spared a subpoena to testify in Sterling's trial; if he didn't give up Sterling as his source, that could've meant jail time for contempt of court.

  [NYT / Matt Apuzzo]

• Here's Risen's description of the anti-Iran operation. It's a really extraordinary screw-up, which appears, if anything, to have helped the Iranians toward a bomb.

  [The Guardian / James Risen]

• Most press coverage on the case focused on Risen, even though Sterling's the one who blew the whistle and the one who's now going to prison.

  [Politico / Josh Gerstein]

• Subpoenaing Risen would have been a threat to press freedom. But so is imprisoning Sterling for leaking information that, at least arguably, the public deserves to know.

3. I'm all out of air. I'm so lost without you.

Nope. (Elsa/Getty Images)

• New England Patriots QB Tom Brady has been suspended for four games for his role in "Deflategate."

  [NYT / Bill Pennington]

• In case you haven't been following: after months of controversy, an NFL investigation found that 11 out of the 12 footballs the Pats used in the first half of the AFC Championship game in January were underinflated, making it easier for Brady to grip them and giving the team an unfair advantage over the Indianapolis Colts.

  [Vox / Joseph Stromberg]

• The report concluded that Brady probably knew about the scheme. After never talking on the phone or exchanging texts with equipment assistant John Jastremski — who was allegedly involved in the plot — for six months leading up to January 19, the day the scandal broke, Brady talked to him on the phone eight times and exchanged 15 texts that day.

  [Business Insider / Tony Manfred]

• Jim McNally, who allegedly conspired with Jastremski and served as chief ball deflater, appears to really hate Brady, at one point threatening to overinflate his balls into "fuckin' watermelons."

  [SB Nation / Seth Rosenthal]

• You can read the full report here.

  [Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP]

• The report is ridiculously comprehensive: "Someone also apparently 'simulated' whether it’s possible to deflate 13 footballs in under 1 minute and 40 seconds. Apparently it is."

  [FiveThirtyEight / Andrew Flowers]

• Brady's suspension is two games longer than former Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice's initial suspension for beating his wife; the NFL has since raised the punishment for a first domestic violence offense to a six-game suspension.

  [Boston Globe / Ben Volin]

4. Misc.

• It's not just you: Facebook really is getting more aggressive about annoying you on friends' birthdays.

  [Slate / Jacob Brogan]

• Barbara Walters and Meryl Streep have both repeatedly stolen hand towels from the White House.

  [Washington Post / Juliet Eilperin]

• Following a FOIA request, the DEA has confirmed it has no research on what rabbits are like on marijuana.

  [MuckRock / Beryl Lipton]

• How to win everything from Battleship to Diplomacy to The Price is Right, in 20 charts.

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

• A Greek newspaper thinks it's found the woman about whom Pulp's Jarvis Cocker wrote "Common People" — and today, Danae Stratou is married to Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

  [The Independent / Hazel Sheffield]

• My old college roommate, the brilliant and talented Matt Aucoin, has a great profile in the Boston Globe pegged to his new opera Crossing, which premieres May 29 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  [Boston Globe / Malcolm Gay]

5. Verbatim

• "One voter decided to draw a detailed representation of a penis instead of a cross in my box on one ballot paper. Amazingly, because it was neatly drawn within the confines of the box the returning officer deemed it a valid vote. I'm not sure the artist meant it to count, but I am grateful."

  [Conservative MP Glyn Davies via BBC]

• "The better the professors were, as measured by their students' grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students."

  [NPR / Anya Kamenetz]

• "I'd never been in a relationship when I wrote my first couple of albums, so these were all projections of what I thought they might be like."

  [Taylor Swift to Elle / Tavi Gevinson]

• "If you look at a Venn diagram of science and art, taxidermy is where they meet."

  [Allis Markham to Rookie / Anna Fitzpatrick]

• "Clown International has lost almost 90 percent of its members from its peak in the 1980s."

  [The Atlantic / Sophie Gilbert]

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