Was Bin Laden being held by Pakistan when US gunned him down?
BARACK Obama lied about numerous aspects of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, it was claimed last night.
A veteran US journalist alleges that despite the White House telling the public the Al Qaeda leader was on the run, they knew he had been held captive in Pakistan since 2006.
Seymour Hersh claimed that, contrary to President Obama’s claims, the Pakistanis did know about the 2011 raid in Abbottabad. Bin Laden was not even buried at sea and some of his body parts were thrown out of a helicopter on the way back to base by Navy SEALs, he said.
The claims are made in a startling article by Mr Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, who claims to offer an ‘alternative history of the war on terror’.
In a 10,000-word piece in the London review of Books, he exposes the ‘lies, mis- statements and betrayals’ by the Obama administration.
Last night the White House and security officials strongly disputed the article and said it relied on one anonymous, inaccurate source.
The killing of Bin Laden was seen as one of the defining moments of Mr Obama’s time in office and gave him a muchneeded boost in the polls.
But according to Hersh, he told one ‘ blatant lie’ after another. The most serious ‘lie’ was that the Pakistanis were not aware of what was going on, but Hersh says that the Pakistani intelligence service ISI knew exactly what was happening. In fact, they had allegedly been holding Bin Laden captive since 2006 to use him as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The US claims that it would have taken Bin Laden alive but a firefight in the grounds of his compound meant that the SEALs had to shoot him.
Citing a ‘major US source’, Hersh writes: ‘There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone’.
The article claims that Bin Laden’s courier did not tip off the US; instead the information came from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who wanted the $25 million reward. Hersh also says Bin Laden was not buried at sea as the official story claimed. If this were true it would be a breach of Islamic rules for burial and a grave insult to Bin Laden and his family.
The article says: ‘ The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the SEALs claimed.’
Hersh, 78, is one of the most well-known and decorated journalists in America.
He exposed the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War in 1969 and broke the scandal of the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in the Iraq War.
The US media reacted with scepticism to Hersh’s report, with CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen calling it a ‘farrago of nonsense’.
A White House spokesman said: ‘There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to factcheck each one.’
‘Body parts tossed out’