Robert O'Neill, the former Navy SEAL who says he fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden, described a story as "ludicrous" by
journalist Seymour Hersh that the al-Qaida leader was taken without a firefight.
"When I was first sent this article, I thought it was a joke,"
O'Neill said Monday on Fox News Channel's "Shepard Smith Reporting."
"This thing is so ludicrous it's almost an insult to the word ludicrous."
O'Neill said members of SEAL Team 6 killed three guards in a firefight after being dropped off in the compound by helicopters. One of those guards was bin Laden's own son, Khaled.
"For this guy to have a few guys from Pakistan just lie to him and him to write this ridiculous story, it's a comedy," O'Neill told Fox News.
Hersh credits a single unnamed source he says has knowledge of the operation. The Pakistani government was informed and members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were involved, Hersh wrote.
O'Neill says no one in the Pakistani government was told in advance because certain parts of the government and military "don't really like us." Had those elements known in advance, they would have tipped bin Laden off and he wouldn't have been at the compound when SEAL Team 6 arrived, O'Neill said.
Hersh said President Barack Obama's telling of the capture was inaccurate, but O'Neill said it was Hersh's story that was "full of lies."
Hersh's account "took me a long time to read because I had to put it down; I couldn't read the nonsense," O'Neill said.
Shepard Smith said Hersh has not responded to requests from Fox to talk about the story.
Smith praised the résumé of Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, but added that his single-sourced story flies in the face of every other account of the killing of bin Laden, and he would be happy to have Hersh talk about his sourcing.
"You realize there had to have been this enormous conspiracy if everything that we heard was not true," Smith said. "It almost felt kind of 9/11 truther-ish."
But, he added, "If there are things there that we've been told that weren't the truth, it wouldn't be the first time."
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