The NYT article on Hersh's report linked a column from 2011 that recounted the same scenario. In doing so, the NYT was not one to undercut the story, the reporter also quoted Hersh: “Those are classic nondenial denials,” he said, before rushing off to take a call from another reporter.

The most convincing thing in the Hersh account is that the Seals waited around for another helicopter while the damaged one was smoking or burning. As Hersh says, no way would they wait around in potentially hostile territory, they would toss heavy gear, pile in, and high tail it out on one chopper.

Since no movie will ever be made of what seems the real event, the revelations are a non-event. There have been worse lies told, esp. almost every day from 2000-2008.

The word "conspiracy" has become a parlor trick that distracts from actually analyzing situations.

Of course our attempts to catch Osama bin Laden would be an official conspiracy to weed out some clue from somewhere - human intelligence or satellite/drone surveillance or some collaborator/turncoat somewhere or the load of torture-for-revelations or ...

There's little doubt that US government & US military would embellish or distort the conditions of OBL's capture & killing - like with Pat Tillman or Jessica Lynch or anything else (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen...) - so it's more a matter of objectively evaluating and deciding which details from USG or Hersh or elsewhere seem believable and why.

Our whole training program in Iraq & Afghanistan was a fiasco that still managed to bolster the career of Petraeus until he self-destructed. That "conspiracy" is in plain sight, but only a few hippie bloggers see it or care, while everyone else is invested in the notion that the surge worked and they stood up while we stood down - even though civilian death rates remain consistently horrid and the local police forces remain ineffective. But a storyline has been created, and that's what will stay, whatever new facts appear.

That doesn't mean any new storylines are true - only that first-mover advantage is completely effective and extremely difficult to counter. You don't have to pay people to keep quiet or go along - they just naturally do - hear a story & if it sounds convincing enough, you pass it along. By day 3, the OBL story was cemented in our brains in full detail, whether exaggerated or not. It's also why the Republicans set out to put doubt about Benghazi from day 1 - no matter what Susan Rice had actually said in public, they simply said she hadn't said it and built their counter hyped conspiracy story from there. And for a lot of the populace, that's the storyline they believe. Lather, rinse, repeat.