Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday defended his 10,000-plus word expose alleging the Obama administration mischaracterized many details surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden.
“I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh said on CNN’s “New Day,” adding, “I understand the consequences of saying what I’m saying.”
“I’m waiting for the White House to deny the story,” he added later.
Hersh’s piece, published Sunday in the London Review of Books, alleges that the narrative pushed by the Obama administration following the 2011 death of bin Laden was mainly false.
The article alleged that Pakistan knew the whereabouts of the former al Qaeda mastermind and that U.S. leaders mischaracterized the raid leading to bin Laden’s death as including a “firefight.”
It also paints President Obama as rushing to take credit for the death of bin Laden a year before reelection, forcing the military and intelligence communities to offer complementing details to form the narrative.
Hersh based much of his account on a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”
“I don’t think that’s correct to say one anonymous source,” Hersh said on CNN. “The story says clearly that I was able to vet and verify information with others in the community. It’s very tough for guys still inside to get quoted extensively.”
~~~ “Every sentence I was reading was wrong,” Mike Morell, the former, two-time acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Monday on “CBS This Morning.”
“The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he’s talking about,” Morell said. “The person obviously was not close to what happened. The Pakistanis did not know.”
Hersh may be right in some or all of his investigative critique; or he may be wrong. I’d take anything he has to say with a grain of salt. He’s the same doofus who wrote about abu Ghraib.
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