This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is standing by his explosive — and widely criticized — story that the Obama administration lied about the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Among the controversial claims in the story published Sunday in the London Review of Books is that bin Laden actually was a prisoner of Pakistan in the Abbottabad compound where he was killed, that high-level Pakistani officials worked to ensure the U.S. mission's success and that the terrorist's body never was buried at sea.
The White House, CIA and many news organizations have attacked the story as false, even ridiculous.
Hersh, however, has acknowledged one mistake — involving Utah.
The original version said that after a former Pakistani intelligence official told the U.S. where to find bin Laden for reward money, "the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Utah, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack."
As Utahns know, there has never been a nuclear test site in the Beehive State, although fallout from detonations at the Nevada Test Site drifted into Utah.
Challenged on this and many other details on CNN, Hersh allowed he had made an error on this one point.
"If I'm wrong about Utah, that's just a mistake, because I know exactly where they were in Nevada. But sometimes, my geography gets lousy," Hersh said, according to The Hill newspaper.
The London Review of Book's story now has been updated to replace Utah with Nevada.
— Dan Harrie