US trashes claim that ISI revealed Osama Bin Laden's hideout

Washington: The US has rejected as "inaccurate" and "baseless" a claim by a top American investigative journalist that a Pakistani intelligence officer provided inputs to CIA about the hideout of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who was later killed in a raid by Navy Seals.

American investigative journalist Seymour M Hersh had claimed that the Pakistani officer disclosed the hideout of Osama to the CIA in exchange for a USD 25 million bounty on the head of the al-Qaeda chief, who was living as a prisoner under ISI protection in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

"I can tell you that the White House is not the only one to observe that the story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said yesterday.

"The former Deputy Director of the CIA, Mike Morell, has said that every sentence was wrong. And, Peter Bergen, a security analyst for CNN, described the story as being about 10,000 words in length; and he said, based on reading it, that what's true in the story isn't new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true. So I thought that was a pretty good way of describing why no one here is particularly concerned about it," Earnest said in response to a question.

White House National Security Council spokesman Edward Price said, "there are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one."

Talking to reporters, Price said, "Nevertheless, the notion that the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was anything but a unilateral US mission is patently false."

"As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior US 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 US operation through and through," the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, American TV network NBC News also reported that the Pakistani government knew the whereabouts of Osama.

In a news report based on unnamed sources, it claimed that a former Pakistani intelligence official was the one who provided information about the hiding point of Osama.

The Pentagon also strongly refuted the new versions describing them as an act of fiction and lies.

Pentagon spokesperson Lt Col Steve Warren told reporters that the new account had "too many inaccuracies" and was "largely a fabrication".

Republican Senator John McCain supported the Administration’s version.

"I simply have never heard of anything like this and I've been briefed several times. This was a great success on the part of the administration and something that we all admire the president's decision to do," he said.