A report last weekend suggesting the Obama administration lied about Pakistani involvement in the May 2011 U.S. commando raid to kill Osama bin Laden has come under fire from multiple quarters including the White House.
On Sunday, acclaimed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had published in the London Review of Books an account of the death of the al-Qaeda boss where he said that it was a “blatant lie” that top brass of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence were not involved in planning the operation with their U.S. counterparts, and that bin Laden was actually being held prisoner by the Pakistani military in exchange for funds from Saudi Arabia for his upkeep.
However, his narrative has been widely panned as being one that does hold up to scrutiny.
At the heart of the problems with the account of Mr. Hersh, who became famous for his major exposés on the My Lai massacre in 1969, the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 and the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria, are concerns regarding his sources.
For the most part Mr. Hersh’s claims are supported by only two sources that neither had direct knowledge of the events, nor served actively in government at the time of the raid and one of those sources remains anonymous.
Mr. Hersh identifies one source as Asad Durrani, the man in charge of the IS from 1990 to 1992. Further, NBC news on Monday published a report apparently corroborating some parts of Mr. Hersh’s story.
However the White House reiterated its position that it did not tell the Pakistani government about the raid before it launched.
On Monday, White House National Security spokesman Ned Price dismissed the report as “baseless,” and added, “The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false.”
‘No one got the bounty’Meanwhile a former CIA Deputy Director, Michael Morell, said on Tuesday that no one had collected the bounty placed on bin Laden’s head by the U.S.
Further the Navy SEAL who said that he’d shot bin Laden dead debunked Mr. Mr. Hersh’s story, saying, “Well I’m sure that my friends who got shot at and almost took a few bullets to the face through the doors would disagree with them there and be insulted… I saw Osama bin Laden standing on two feet, there was no ISI up there.”
