White House denies Bin Laden killing was stage managed

Obama's White House on Monday was quick to deny allegations by a prominent US journalist and author that the US President misled the public about the operation four years ago in Pakistan targeting al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden.

In an article in the London Review of Books, published on Sunday, Hersh pours scorn on the US claim  that Bin Laden had been hiding in plain sight in a Pakistani city renowned for its links to that country's army.

Hersh says that Bin Laden was indeed living in a villa in Abbottabad, but that Pakistan's ISI spy service was keeping the America's most wanted man a prisoner there since they captured him after he was betrayed by tribesmen in the Hindu Kush mountains in 2006. 

"The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control," an anonymous retired official, who is the major source in the 10,000 word piece, is quoted as saying by Hersh.

Hersh alleges that Bin Laden's location was only tipped off to the CIA after a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer was tempted by the $25m on offer for Bin Laden's capture, and that the country responsible for his upkeep in Abbottabad was Saudi Arabia.

Hersh paints a story of intrigue, cover-ups and bare-faced lies, with the story of Bin Laden's burial at sea also rubbished, and the claim made that pieces of his bullet-ridden body were instead thrown by the US Navy Seals from their Black Hawk helicopter over the same Hindu Kush mountains that Bin Laden had hid in years earlier.

As expected, there has already been pushback on Hersh's story, with a former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, calling the story "all wrong" on US television on Monday.

"Every sentence I was reading was wrong," said Morell. "The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he's talking about. The person obviously was not close to what happened. The Pakistanis did not know... The president made a decision not to tell the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis were furious with us."

The question of sourcing has been a major criticism of Hersh's piece, with critics pointing out that the essay was essentially based on the words of an unnamed official and Asad Durrani, a retired general who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, both of whom would not have had first-hand knowledge of the case.

Hersh reported on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and his later work included an expose of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison by US forces.