The White House on Monday doubled down on its original narrative of the killing of Osama bin Laden, a day after a report by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist suggested the Obama Administration had lied about details of the 2011 raid.
Ned Price, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said that contrary to the article by Seymour Hersh, the operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was a unilateral U.S. mission without Pakistani involvement. “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,” he said. “This was a U.S. operation through and through.”
The central allegation in Hersh’s article, published Sunday in the London Review of Books, is that the U.S. worked in collaboration with the Pakistani government in the run-up to the raid. “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,” writes Hersh. “This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account.”
Hersh’s single source for this assertion is “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.”
The White House has called the allegations “patently false,” the Wall Street Journal reports, while a CIA spokesman said Hersh’s report was “utter nonsense.”
American officials have consistently maintained that the killing of Osama bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs was done without any Pakistani involvement. Then CIA chief Leon Panetta told TIME in his first postraid interview on May 3, 2011, that the U.S. had decided not to tell Pakistan about the raid beforehand.
