Former CIA Director Leon Panetta says investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is wrong.
Panetta discredits Hersh’s report published in the London Review of Books, which alleges that the Pakistani government knew in advance about the United States’ raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.
At a news conference Monday put on by his institute at the Monterey Conference Center in California, Panetta said he had not read Hersh’s article but responded to the claims in the report, saying Pakistan did not know about the raid in advance. He had been the CIA Director at the time of the attack.
“I can assure you bin Laden was not in the custody of Pakistan,” he said, adding, “and was operating, obviously, in this compound.”
“As a result of that, and a result of what he did on 9/11, I couldn’t be prouder of the operation that went after bin Laden and brought justice,” Panetta added.
Panetta is one of a several U.S. officials who have denied the report as true, including White House National Security spokesman Ned Price and White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” Price said in a statement to reporters Monday. “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.”
The report was published this weekend and cites a “major U.S. source,” alleging that President Barack Obama’s administration cooperated with Pakistani intelligence officials to kill bin Laden.
On CNN’s News Day Monday morning, Hersh defended this report, telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo that, “This is not a wager — this is a story that has to be dealt with by this government very seriously.”
He admits that he may have gotten some things wrong in his report, but sticks by most of the claims.
“I would argue that a lot of the stories I wrote were pretty much on-mark,” he said.
