In an article in the London Review of Books dated May 21, 2015, the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims the official account of how Osama bin Laden (founder of al-Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States) was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011 is false. In the official account by the White House and American government, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly followed the movements of one of Osama bin Laden's couriers who led them to bin Laden's hiding place. Seymour Hersh claims that
In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001.
Hersh also claims that
bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI [Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence] at the Abbottabad compound since 2006
Hersh makes other claims but those are two of the most important. Is Seymour Hersh's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden credible, or is it -- as critics have claimed -- a conspiracy theory?
