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Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's controversial story claiming that the White House lied about key details of the 2011 operation to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden was repudiated this morning by several notable experts.
CNN's national-security analyst, Peter Bergen, ripped the story, which ran in the London Review of Books, as a "farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense."
And a former top official at the CIA was equally dismissive.
"It's all wrong," former CIA deputy director Mike Morell told CBS News on Monday morning. "I started reading the article last night, and I got a third of the way through because every sentence I was reading was wrong."
Much of the criticism of the story centers around Hersh's reliance for many details in his account on a single unnamed source he describes as "a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad."
Morell was extremely dubious of that source's knowledge. "The person obviously was not close to what actually happened. The Pakistanis did not know."
In a detailed analysis published on Monday morning, Vox's Max Fisher took aim at Hersh's lack of supporting documents or other proof to support his claims, concluding:
"If that seems like worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years, then you are not alone."
The story was also condemned by the White House, with national-security spokesman Ned Price saying that it contained "too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions ... to fact check each one."
Hersh is vigorously defending his story. He appeared on CNN to assert that he's "not out on a limb on this."
He added: "Think about this: a team of SEALS - and our SEALs are the best, there is no question - 24, 25 guys go in to the middle of Pakistan, take out a guy with no air cover, no protection, no security. Are you kidding me?"
Watch Bergen on CNN: