President Obama lied about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The whole thing reads as quite plausible, if it weren't for the holes left by citing speculation as evidence, and refusing to name his single source, or find and name other sources to corroborate this source’s story. Hersh is The New Yorker’s premier foreign correspondent, who broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and whose career includes breaking other major stories and events. This seems a bit beneath him because of that.

President Obama lied about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. That’s right, he lied. The facts of the situation were not as he claimed, according to a new “report” in the London Review of Books. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, claims that Obama’s assertion that the raid was an entirely American operation, without the input or knowledge of the Pakistani government or international coalitions, is a giant lie.

This could seem quite damning, because, as Hersh says, bin Laden’s death played a role in Obama’s 2012 re-election. However, Hersh is basing his information on a single, anonymous source. Everyone else he says he spoke to, and read, merely had speculation and questions, though he cites them as though they also had concrete proof of this claim.

Hersh just has one teensy problem, according to New York Magazine. He has a habit of bending the truth when he’s speaking out loud to audiences. He has changed details of stories in such a way that they can’t be verified. He says he does it to protect innocent people, such as sources, victims, refugees; in other words, people who could face serious consequences for talking. But if he does this while he’s speaking, is it so hard to believe that he also does it when he’s writing?