Former Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill, left, the man who shota and killed Usama bin Laden, right, blasted claims by legendary journalist Seymour Hersh that the government lied about the raid. (Photo: FOX News/AP)
Rob O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Usama bin Laden, ripped a report by journalist Seymour Hersh claiming the government lied about the bin Laden raid.
“When I was first sent this article I thought it was a joke,” O’Neill said Monday. “This thing is so ludicrous it’s almost an insult to the word ludicrous. For someone who wasn’t there to say what I saw happen didn’t happen, and for this guy to have a few guys from Pakistan just lie to him and then have him write this story, it’s a comedy. It’s a joke.”
In the London Review of Books, Hersh claimed the Obama administration dishonestly took sole credit for killing bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 attacks. Hersh’s report was based on one anonymous source “who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad” and had an active role in approving the raid that killed bin Laden. The source says that the Pakistani government provided significant assistance, and called into question several details about the raid that have become accepted fact.
The White House responded to a request for comment late Monday morning, stating the report was full of “inaccuracies and baseless assertions.”
“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” White House national security spokesman Ned Price said in a statement. “Nevertheless, the notion that the operation that killed Usama Bin Ladin was anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false. 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-Qa’ida, but this was a U.S. operation through and through.”
