This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated.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 has taken heavy fire over the accuracy of his explosive piece charging that the official story about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden is full of lies.
Hersh, though, continues to stand by the story, including the allegation that bin Laden was a prisoner of Pakistan at the time of his killing, and that he was targeted with the covert cooperation of Pakistan's military intelligence. His most recent defense of his reporting was in a Q & A with Slate Magazine under the headline "I am not backing off anything I said."
But that's not entirely true.
As previously noted, a mention of Utah disappeared from the original story as the location where the U.S. military reportedly built a mock-up of the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound for pre-mission training of Navy SEALs.
Hersh acknowledged the mistake — and changed the location to Nevada.
"Sometimes my geography gets lousy," he said in an earlier interview with CNN.
But now Hersh is blaming the error on an editor at the London Review of Books, where the bin Laden piece was published Sunday.
"At one point a copy editor in England confronted me about the SEALs training in Nevada and changed it to Utah," Hersh told Slate. "And the line made it because, according to her, they were sort of the same thing."
— Dan Harrie