Alwaght-Four years after a Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden, Seymour Hersh accused White House of staging a massive cover-up for Osama bin Laden killing.
He is alleging that the official account of Bin Laden’s killing four years ago by Navy Seals who raided his compound was a fairy tale, because questions still remain about the raid and raiders.
His 10,000-word article appeared in the London Review of Books as a criticism on White House's story in Bin Laden killing, might have been written by Lewis Carroll ."
Mr. Hersh is standing by his article, noting on this issue, "You can have your skepticism ".
In fact, there are the varying narratives by the White House in the days and weeks after the raid, but those are classic non-denial denials in my mind.
Pakistan sheltered Bin Laden for years with money paid by Saudi Arabia. Once the United States found out the Pakistanis had Bin Laden, Mr. Hersh notes, it offered Pakistan’s generals a choice: Help the United States kill him or watch billions of dollars in American aid disappear. The Americans and the Pakistanis then worked together to plot the raid, Mr. Hersh writes, CNN reported.
However, Pulitzer prizewinning journalist Seymour Hersh accuses Obama administration of covering up the facts in order to take credit for Bin Laden’s death.
On Monday, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the article is “riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods .”
Mr. Hersh is not the first person to present this version of events. A similar account was presented on Aug. 7, 2011, on the blog The Spy Who Billed Me, which is run by R. J. Hillhouse,
Among the many findings of Hersh's report are that :
• 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 .
