Former US SEAL calls Seymour Hersh report on Bin Laden death ‘garbage’

The former US Navy SEAL who claims he shot dead Osama bin Laden has rejected an article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that says the US misled the world by staging the raid on the al-Qaeda leader’s compound.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Rob O’Neill called Hersh’s account of the events garbage. “The story that I read, the part from Hersh, was full of lies.”

“It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense,” he added.

In an article published on the London Review of Books on Sunday, Hersh wrote that high-level lying “remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.”

Hersh wrote that Pakistani intelligence officials played an important role in the Bin Laden operation, despite the Obama administration’s assertion that the assassination was done without their knowledge.

The report claims that Pakistani military officers helped US helicopters enter the country and that a Pakistani security official led the American troops directly to Bin Laden without any resistance from guards.

O’Neill criticized Hersh’s claims that Pakistani officials contributed to the assassination mission and that there was no resistance.

"Well I’m sure that my friends who got shot at and almost took a few bullets to the face through the doors would disagree with them there and be insulted," O'Neill said.

“I saw Osama bin Laden standing on two feet, there was no ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) up there. I shot him in the head twice and then I shot him again in the face while he was on the ground.”

Washington announced on May 2, 2011 that Bin Laden was killed in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by US special forces and CIA operatives. He was the founder of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that allegedly claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The September 11 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of strikes in the US which killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

US officials assert that the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists but many experts have raised questions about the official account, saying it was a false-flag operation and that Bin Laden was just a bogeyman for the US military-industrial complex.

They believe that rogue elements within the US government orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the US war machine and advance the Zionist agenda.

In an interview with Press TV last month, American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett said the 9/11 attacks had been covered-up by the FBI and senior US officials because it was the “mother of all false flag” operations.

“If people start looking hard at 9/11, the whole story is going to unravel and its going to be exposed as the mother of all false flag attacks and the most spectacular act of deception in human history and the FBI has been charged with covering it up,” said Dr. Barrett, a founding member of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance.

The so-called al-Qaeda terrorists who allegedly hijacked four planes and crashed them on September 11 were just “patsies who were falsely blamed for 9/11, they were set-up,” Dr. Barrett noted.

GJH/GJH

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk