Yesterday we brought you a story that is gathering speed and grabbing headlines right around the world – the allegations made by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh that the US lied about how the killing of Osama bin Laden unfolded.

Hersh alleges that the US found bin Laden not through an intricate mission that involved tracking his message courier to his hideout in Pakistan, but were tipped off by a senior intelligence officer who wanted the $25 million reward offered for information leading to his capture. He also claimed that Pakistan had been harbouring bin Laden knowingly since 2006, using him as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda activities within their borders.

The US government were quick to rubbish the report, stating simply that the story had ‘too many inaccuracies to detail’. Now a New York Times reporter and a group of NBC reporters have claimed that they too came across information that casts doubt on the US’s version of events.

First up here’s Carlotta Gall, a New York Times correspondent based in Afghanistan, as reported on Gawker:

I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset…it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence service] are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI…

Next there is the group of reporters over at NBC who had this to say on the matter:

The NBC News sources who confirm that a former Pakistani military intelligence official became a U.S. intelligence asset include a special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI’s awareness, saying twice, “They knew.

The military snitch was named by a Pakistani newspaper as Brigadier Usman Khalid.

We all know the saying ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire’, and it seems like the US government’s account of how the bin Laden killing unfolded is rapidly going up in smoke. No doubt we can expect a strongly worded condemnation of the allegations at some point in the near future.

[source:gawker]