WATCH: Highly-respected journalist Seymour Hersh says his source tells him the official story of how Osama bin Laden was killed is a lie. Jackson Proskow reports on the startling claims and official denials.
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh set off a firestorm after calling into question the White House’s official story on the takedown of Osama bin Laden.
Hersh, in a 10,356-word article published Sunday on the London Review of Books website, claimed bin Laden’s 2011 killing in a Navy SEAL assault was not a U.S.-only affair and that Pakistan not only knew about the raid in advance but had been holding the al Qaeda leader for some time beforehand.
The White House rejected Hersh’s article, calling its claims “patently false.”
“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” CNN reported White House National Security spokesman Ned Price saying in a statement.
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Political and security analysts made their attempts to debunk the article’s claims.
WATCH: White House spokesman Josh Earnest says Hersh’s article is riddled with inaccuracies and falsehoods.
“The story simply does not hold up to scrutiny — and, sadly, is in line with Hersh’s recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories,” wrote Vox’s Max Fisher.
“A decade ago, Hersh was one of the most respected investigative journalists on the planet, having broken major stories from the 1969 My Lai massacre to the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal. But more recently, his reports have become less and less credible.”
Fisher goes on to point to a 2014 Hersh article, also published by the London Review of Books, reported the 2013 chemical weapons attacks in the East Ghouta suburb of Damascus, Syria, were linked opposition groups with the backing of Turkey.
CNN’s National Security Analyst Peter Bergen questioned Hersh’s reporting an unnamed official saying Pakistan had been holding bin Laden at the Abottabad compound where he was killed, and that Saudi Arabia had been “financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis.”
“Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans,” Bergen wrote.
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Retired CIA deputy director Michael Morrell told CBS This Morning host Charlie Rose “every sentence I was reading was wrong.”
“The Pakistanis did not know… The president sent me to Pakistan after the raid to try to start smoothing things over,” said Morrell, who is also a contributor to CBS News.
Although Morrell admitted he didn’t know the identity of Hersh’s unnamed source, he said the official had “no idea what he was talking about” and “was not close” to the operation.
Bergen took issue with how Hersh backed up the claims in the article.
“Hersh’s account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense,” he added.
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The lack of corroboration was also an issue for Vox’s Fisher.
“Hersh produces no supporting documents or proof, nor is the authority of either source established. We are given no reason to believe that either Durrani or the ‘knowledgeable official’ would have even second- or third-hand knowledge of what occurred, yet their word is treated as gospel. His other two sources are anonymous ‘consultants’ who are vaguely described as insiders,” he wrote.
Hersh, who will be the keynote speaker at the Canadian Association for Journalists annual conference in Halifax later this month, defended his article on Monday in an interview with CNN.
“The story says clearly that I was able to vet and verify information with others in the community,” Hersh said.
He further defended his use of an unnamed source for much of the article’s claims, saying “it’s very tough for guys on the inside to get quoted extensively.”
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