The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is slamming a new report that challenges the White House’s account of the mission, calling it “garbage.”
“The story that I read, the part from [Seymour] Hersh, was full of lies,” Rob O’Neill said on Fox News’s “Shepard Smith Reporting.“
“It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense.”
{mosads}Hersh on Sunday published in story in the London Review of Books that says Pakistani intelligence officers played a significant role in the bin Laden operation, despite the White House’s assertion that the mission was undertaken without their knowledge.
The report alleges that key Pakistani military leaders helped American helicopters slip into the country undetected and that a Pakistani security officer led the American soldiers directly to bin Laden without any resistance from guards, who were ordered to flee the compound.
Hersh also wrote that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had been holding bin Laden hostage for years and that the American government only discovered his location after a former Pakistani intelligence officer gave it up for millions of dollars in reward money.
O’Neill specifically criticized Hersh’s assertion that Pakistani officials were part of the mission to kill the al Qaeda leader 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 up there. I shot him in the head twice and then I shot him again in the face while he was on the ground. “
The White House dismissed Hersh’s story in a statement Monday, saying it contains “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions” to count.
O’Neill anonymously told his story of killing bin Laden to Esquire in 2013 and publicly came out from the shadows in a Washington Post story last November.
The Navy is currently investigating whether he leaked classified information, and some Special Forces soldiers have questioned his story, according to The Daily Beast.
— This story was updated at 5:15 p.m.