The White House dismissed claims of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist that President Barack Obama lied about the circumstances around the infamous killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, CNN reported May 11.

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White House National Security spokesman, Ned Price, said in a press briefing that the report of the journalist, Seymour Hersh, had "too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions."

Hersh, in his 10,356-word piece published in the London Review of Books, said that the assassination of Bin Laden was a result of cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistanis. In fact, Hersh wrote, Pakistan's intelligence service called Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, also cooperated with the Americans.

"The killing was the high point of Obama's first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair... This is false," Hersh wrote.

Hersh noted that his source for his article, described as "an alternative history of the war on terror" by London Review of Books, was a retired senior intelligence official.

Hersh also claimed that the U.S. worked with Pakistan's two most senior military leaders, Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI Director General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.

Price was quoted by CNN as saying that the raid and death of Bin Laden was a "U.S. operation through and through" and that the suggestion that it was not is "patently false." The spokesman, however, noted that the U.S. and Pakistan governments have been working together to eradicate the terrorist group al-Qa'ida.

Aside from the White House, others have refuted Hersh's so-called expose of Obama's lies. One such person is CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen, who said that Hersh's article was "a farrago of nonsense" that can be contradicted by eyewitness accounts.  

Pakistan publication Daily Times reported May 12 that Hersh's article has gained traction in the United Kingdom but "scant coverage" in the United States. 

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