"There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one," White House National Security spokesman, Ned Price said in a statement to reporters.He took aim specifically at journalist Seymour Hersh's assertion that the administration collaborated with Pakistani officials to kill the al Qaeda leader, saying that "the notion that the operation that killed Usama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false."
"As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior U.S. 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. We had been and continue to be partners with Pakistan in our joint effort to destroy al-Qa'ida, but this was a U.S. operation through and through." Price said.It was the White House's first response to Hersh's stunning report, published this past weekend in the London Review of Books, outlining what he describes as the true circumstances surrounding bin Laden's death. Other former administration officials have panned the report as well.
Citing an anonymous "major U.S. source," Hersh writes that the Obama administration cooperated with Pakistani intelligence officials to kill bin Laden, and that the chief of staff of the Pakistani army and director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency knew about the mission, contrary to Obama's claim that Pakistani officials weren't aware of the raid in advance.
CNN National Security Analyst, Peter Bergen immediately rebutted Hersh's allegations in a post that contradicts most of the claims in his 10,000 word report.
"Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense," Bergen wrote Monday.Read more on CNN here
No comments:
Post a Comment