Osama bin Laden: Journalist says White House lied

A Pulitzer-winning American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, has alleged that the White House lied about the way Osama bin Laden was killed.

In an article published in the London Review of Books on Sunday, Hersh said President Barack Obama’s version of the events that led to the death of the one-time most wanted terrorist in the world was just a fiction.

But Hersh’s claims have been questioned by Peter Bergen, a CNN’s national security analyst who said Hersh misfired for basing his 10, 000-word article on one unreliable source.

Hersh insisted that there was a cooperation between Pakistani and American intelligent communities and that the raid in which Bin Laden was killed was not an all-American affair.

“This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll (the author of “Alice in the Wonderland)

“The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – (retired) Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (who was chief of the army staff at the time), and Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission,” Hersh wrote in the article.

The principal claims that Hersh’s article makes, which largely rely on the assertions of a single, unnamed, retired senior U.S. intelligence official, are:

Hersh’s major argument in his new report is that quite contrary to what Obama administration officials claimed in the wake of the bin Laden raid, U.S. and Pakistani officials were fully conversant about bin Laden’s whereabouts in the northern city of Abbottabad, cooperated in his capture and then engaged in a massive cover-up of all this, involving officials at many different levels of government in both nations.

That the 2011 U.S. Navy SEAL raid on the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was hiding in northern Pakistan was not a firefight in which SEALs went into a dangerous and unknown situation, but a setup in which Pakistan’s military had been holding bin Laden prisoner in Abbottabad for five years and simply made him available to the SEALs who flew in helicopters to the compound on the night of the raid.

An officer from Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence agency ISI accompanied the SEALs on the raid and showed them around the Abbottabad compound, and the only shots fired that night were the ones that the SEALs fired to kill bin Laden.

A “walk in” to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad tipped off the CIA that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound, and it was not true — despite the statements of multiple U.S. officials after the raid — that the CIA had traced back one of bin Laden’s couriers to the Abbottabad compound and built a circumstantial case that bin Laden was living there.

Saudi Arabia was financing bin Laden’s upkeep in his Abbottabad compound.

A Pakistani army doctor obtained DNA from bin Laden that proved he was in Abbottabad, proof that was provided to the States so that all the supposed uncertainty — cited by Obama administration officials after the raid — about whether bin Laden was actually living in the compound was a lie.

The “most blatant lie,” according to Hersh, was that “Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders — General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI — were never informed” in advance of the U.S. raid on the bin Laden compound.

In short, according to Hersh’s account, President Barack Obama and many of his top advisers lied about pretty much everything concerning what is considered one of the President’s signal accomplishments: authorizing the raid in which bin Laden was killed.