The White House is denouncing a controversial story by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that claims the Obama administration lied about crucial details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
In a piece published in the London Review of Books on May 10, Hersh disputes the official account of the operation and intelligence that led to bin Laden's death. Relying heavily on an individual identified as an "retired senior intelligence official " Hersh reports that bin Laden had been held prisoner by Pakistani intelligence since 2006, and that Pakistani intelligence cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency and US Navy SEALs in the raid to kill bin Laden.
In a statement tweeted by CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, White House national security spokesman Ned Price said that Hersh's report contained "too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions" to fact check.
"The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral US mission is patently false," Price said.
"As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of US officials. The president decided early on not to inform any other government, including the Pakistani government, which was not notified until after the raid had occurred," Price said.
"This was a US operation through and through," Price said.
In an interview with "CBS This Morning" on Monday, former deputy CIA director Mike Morell criticized Hersh's story more directly.
"It's all wrong," former CIA deputy director Mike Morell said. "I started reading the article last night and I got a third of the way through because every sentence I was reading was wrong."
Hersh has a long career of influential investigative pieces, including his Pulitzer-prize winning report on the 1969 My Lai Massacre and a 2004 report that revealed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
However in recent years, his work has taken on a conspiratorial bent. According to Vox, Hersh first shopped his bin Laden piece to the New Yorker, which has published many of his in-depth investigative stories. Vox reports that New Yorker editors refused to publish the story, creating tension between longtime colleagues Hersh and editor David Remnick.
Hersh's series on an alleged Obama administration cover-up of a supposed chemical weapons attack by terrorists in Syria, which the New Yorker was also not interested in, was heavily criticized in 2014.
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