The White House has pushed back hard on a report that claims that everything we thought we knew about the US raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden is wrong.  And instead of turning into an indictment of the US government, the story is now a window on a once-respected investigative journalist who appears lost in a briar patch of conspiracy theories.

Seymour Hersh’s charges are explosive:  He claims that contrary to the story from the Obama Administration, Pakistani knew all about the raid to kill bin Laden, and even cooperated.  Hersh says bin Laden was unarmed, instead of shooting an AK-47 as in the official American version – making the raid a de facto execution.  He says that instead of a proper Islamic burial at sea, US soldiers tossed pieces of his body out of a helicopter over a mountain range. 

“The notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral US mission is patently false,” said White House spokesperson Ned Price, who said that Seymour Hersh’s reporting was rife with “inaccuracies and baseless assertions”.

Critics say that Hersh’s 10,000-word story in the London Review of Books is thin on sourcing and jumps to fanciful conclusions, many of which are contradictory or simply don’t make sense.  What’s more, there are a number of Pakistani and US Military eyewitnesses to the raid whose stories already support each other and refute Hersh.

Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War in 1969.  He investigated the Watergate story for the New York Times during the 1970s.  In 2004, he reported on the systematic torture and abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison by members of the US military.  But unlike his more recent work, these stories came with sourcing and attribution.

In recent years, Hersh has reported that much of the US Special Forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei, a secretive group within the Roman Catholic church.  He claims the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training, instead of to any of a number of closer US bases around the world.  Seymour Hersh also alleged the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a “false flag” staged by the government of Turkey.