White House: Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden story is fallacious
The White House has rejected an article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that says the US misled the world by staging the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.
White House Spokesman Josh Earnest described Hersh's claim as false, saying there was nothing accurate about his article.
"I can tell you that the Obama White House is not the only one to observe that the story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods," Earnest said during his daily briefing on Monday.
In an article published on the London Review of Books website on Sunday, Hersh wrote that high-level lying “remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.”
Citing a retired senior US intelligence official, the journalist explained that how the killing of bin Laden was the “high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election.”
Earnest refused to talk about the charges directly, but instead cited a former official and others outside the Obama administration, who have cast doubt on the validity of the report.
“Former deputy director of the CIA Mike Morrell has said that every sentence was wrong,” Earnest said.
He added that CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen also dismissed the piece as unfounded, saying that "what's true in the story isn't new and what's new in the story isn't true."
"That's a pretty good way of describing why no one here is particularly concerned about it," said Earnest.
Hersh wrote in his article that the White House asserts the bin Laden mission was carried out by the US which did not inform the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) of the raid in advance.
However, “this is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account,” he said.
Washington announced on May 2, 2011 that bin Laden was killed by US forces in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
A number of media reports later said the US government was moving to hide files about the US military’s suspected raid on bin Laden.
The lack of transparency over bin Laden's death has cast further doubt over the announcement.
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