WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is dismissing as untrue an article alleging that President Barack Obama misled the public about how the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden.
Spokesman Josh Earnest says journalist Seymour Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books is “riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods.”
Earnest noted former CIA deputy director Michael Morell’s reaction to the article — that he stopped reading because every sentence was wrong.
Hersh attributes his information to a retired general of the Pakistani intelligence service and several unidentified sources in the U.S. and Pakistan. He says bin Laden was secretly kept as a prisoner by the Pakistanis and that they helped the U.S. stage the raid on his compound.
The Obama administration says the Pakistanis didn’t know about the raid in advance.
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What next from Mr. Hersh, the Apollo landings were staged?
What a sad state a once respectable investigative reporting career has fallen into.
Well, this is weird. Hersch was formerly portrayed as a straight shooter. Of course, we’ve seen other formerly reliable journalists go off the rails. Still, the story seems so outlandish at first glance. I hope there truly is nothing there.
A retired Pakistani general and anonymous sources. Yeah… totally believable. (Not)
as if we could have trusted anyone in Pakistan to keep a secret.
of all people Seymour Hersch should know better
That was exactly my reaction. Not only does this require the entire Obama administration to be in league to lie in concert (Democrats aren’t renowned for keeping their stories straight even on truthful matters), but it requires a scorned Pakistani intelligence apparatus to keep quiet about the real situation for over four years. At best, it’s incredibly implausible.