On the heels of Seymour Hersh‘s report that, essentially, everything we were told about the killing of Osama bin Laden “was a lie,” NBC News seemed to confirm parts of Hersh’s report in a story reported by four NBC News journalists.
The NBC story, reported by Andrea Mitchell on “NBC Nightly News,” included in an online version this paragraph:
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.”
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Now, NBC has added an “editor’s note” to the story, as first reported by Slate:
This story has been updated since it was first published. The original version of this story said that a Pakistani asset told the U.S. where bin Laden was hiding. Sources say that while the asset provided information vital to the hunt for bin Laden, he was not the source of his whereabouts.