Washington: Pakistani officials not only knew about Osama bin Laden's location, they also kept him as a prisoner, according to a new exposé by US investigative journalist Seymour M Hersh. Hersh's report claims that the Pakistani military's top brass was aware of the US Special Forces operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad in May, 2011, that killed al Qaeda leader bin Laden.
Islamabad has always maintained that the US acted unilaterally in Abbottabad and that it had no prior knowledge of the al Qaeda leader's whereabouts - something which Washington also officially endorsed. Hersh's claims, therefore, could cause not only an embarrassment to Pakistan's security officials but also to the Americans.
According to Hersh, "a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad" revealed most of the information which he used in his write-up.
Observers say that bin Laden, who was wanted by the US for his role in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had lived in Afghanistan for five years following the US invasion of the country and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban government. In 2006, Pakistani military intelligence, the ISI, “got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him," according to the famed US journalist.
The official US version of bin Laden's death says the American intelligence agencies tracked the al Qaeda leader's compound in Abbottabad by following his couriers. Islamabad doesn't challenge that account. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who gained international recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, says the official account of the secretive bin Laden raid is hard to believe.
"The White House's story might have been written by Lewis Carroll," Hersh wrote in his exposé:
"… the CIA did not learn of bin Laden's whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US," he said.
Hersh added that although it was true that US President Barack Obama "did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration's account were false."
"The most blatant lie was that Pakistan's two most senior military leaders - General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, [former] chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, [former] director general of the ISI - were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions," Hersh said.
