[Business Insider] When the US found Osama bin Laden hiding in a walled compound less than a mile from Pakistan's elite military academy, questions arose about what the country's intelligence agency (ISI) knew about the world's most wanted terrorist hiding in its own backyard.
Journalist Seymour Hersh recently wrote that the US Navy SEAL raid was not unilateral as reported. Instead, Hersh asserts, the mission was fully backed by Pakistan's army commander and the head of the ISI after the US threatened to expose that the ISI had been sheltering bin Laden for at least five years.
Journalists and experts disputed much of Hersh's thinly sourced account. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US at the time of the May 2011 raid, subsequently wrote that Hersh's claims regarding Pakistan's role in and knowledge of the raid "simply do not add up."
In any case, a wealth of information has been uncovered in recent years pointing to ISI complicity in harboring bin Laden, even as the Obama administration's interest in demanding answers from the Pakistani government waned rather quickly in the months following the successful raid.
In other news: Champ approves Syrian mission to kill or capture ISIS Moneyman Abu Sayyaf. Recent Hersh UBL story takes back burner as planned. |