The White House May 11 dismissed a controversial report alleging the Obama administration lied about the circumstances surrounding the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden.
The report by journalist Seymour Hersh, which was published in the London Review of Books on May 10, is full of "inaccuracies and baseless assertions," said White House National Security spokesman Ned Price said.
Hersh wrote that the administration secretly cooperated with Pakistani intelligence officials to kill bin Laden, and that top Pakistani Aarmy and intelligence officials knew about the mission, despite their protests to the contrary.
Journalist Seymour Hersh
"The notion that the operation that killed Osama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false," Price said.
"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-Qaeda, but this was a U.S. operation through and through."