Obama team condemns Hersh's claims about bin Laden raid
The White House and other officials are pushing back hard on an investigative reporter's claims that the Obama administration provided a false narrative about the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
"The story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods," said White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
Reporter Seymour Hersh says that, contrary to administration statements at the time, the United States worked with Pakistan on the raid in that country that killed the al Qaeda leader and architect of the 9/11 attacks.
In an article for the London Review of Books, Hersh wrote that "the White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan's army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration's account."
Officials beyond the White House are also not taking the Hersh story very seriously.
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN that "the reality" is that the U.S. had a long-time program using "hundreds and thousands of people who were assisting with the United States" to track down bin Laden.
Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, speaking Tuesday on Fox and Friends, said he was in the room when President Obama decided not to tell the Pakistani government about the U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.