Monterey>> Former CIA Director Leon Panetta on Monday denied a key claim made by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a Sunday story alleging President Barack Obama’s administration lied about the circumstances surrounding the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Hersh’s 10,356-word article in the London Review of Books claimed Pakistan knew bin Laden was at his Abbottabad compound and aware of the raid ahead of time. President Obama and other officials, including Panetta, said at the time the Pakistanis did not know in advance.

Panetta, at a news conference for a lecture on the economy sponsored by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, said he was not familiar with Hersh’s article but replied to allegations Pakistan had known the terrorist leader had been there for years.

“I can assure you bin Laden was not in the custody of Pakistan,” he said at the Monterey Conference Center, “and was operating, obviously, in this compound.”

The White House has called the report “baseless” but Hersh has stood by the article.

“I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh said on CNN. “I understand the consequences of saying what I’m saying.”

Citing columns written by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, Panetta said bin Laden was continuing to plan attacks against the United States from the compound.

“As a result of that, and a result of what he did on 9/11, I couldn’t be prouder of the operation that went after bin Laden and brought justice,” said Panetta, who was the director of the CIA at the time. “What it did for all of those that died on 9/11, it brought some sense of satisfaction that we were able to do what we had to do.”

Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War, claimed bin Laden was actually held prisoner in the Abbottabad compound by Pakistan for five years.

He wrote that there was no firefight to get bin Laden, instead the Pakistan military just handed him over when the SEALs came and Pakistan’s military intelligence agency actually showed them around the compound.

Despite Hersh’s stature, his article has been widely condemned.

“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact-check each one,” White House spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

The CIA told The Washington Post that the story was “utter nonsense.”

Hersh said his story was mainly based on information given to him by a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, as well as other anonymous sources.

In interviews following the 2011 raid, Panetta said the CIA did not want to tell Pakistan of the operation beforehand because it feared the country would have leaked the information.

Panetta’s news conference was for his policy institute’s lecture on the economy at the Monterey Conference Center on Monday evening.

He was joined by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich; Christina Romer, the former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; and Alan Simpson, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Reich was outnumbered on his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a trade pact being discussed behind closed doors and is said to set new terms for trade and business investment among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations, according to The New York Times.

The TPP is said to create a Pacific Rim free-trade zone that will lower tariffs but raise standards across the board for labor and environmental policy.

Reich told reporters he thought trade, overall, was a good thing but global corporations will have too much power to fight labor regulations in the United States if profits are affected.

According to The Times, multinational corporations will be allowed to challenge different countries’ regulations and court rulings before special tribunals.

“My assessment of the TPP is that it is going to exasperate inequality,” he said, “and the benefits are not going to compensate for the losses overall.”

He said the loss would be good-paying American jobs and good wages.

Romer said the partnership was more of foreign policy issue than an economic one.

“It is really a chance for the United States to say, ‘The countries in Asia are our friends and we really want be a part of this group,’” she said.

Phillip Molnar can be reached at 726-4361.