US government rejects claims that account of bin Laden kill mission was fabricated to help Obama re-election

A published report in Britain that disputes the official US account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 drew sharp criticism on Monday from the White House, which said the story was full of “inaccuracies and baseless assertions”.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in the London Review of Books that the account of the raid given to the public by the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon, and books by self-described participants, contained numerous falsehoods. He suggests crucial details were deliberately dramatised to benefit President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Hersh wrote that the “most blatant lie” was the US claim that Pakistan’s senior military leaders were not informed of the raid, which was carried out by Navy Seals, before it took place.

He cites an anonymous “major US source,” whom he describes as a retired senior intelligence official, and other unnamed US and Pakistani sources, to report that Pakistani leaders were not only aware of the operation, but that their intelligence service had detained Bin Laden and his family in a compound for years, and worked closely with the CIA in planning to kill him.

Ned Price, a spokesman for the National Security Council, rejected Hersh’s account and said there were “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions... to fact check each one”.