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> If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad. But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us

Story A: The CIA does brilliant investigative work. The commander-in-chief makes a gutsy call. The SEALs storm in and kill the bad guy in a firefight. He is buried at sea with full rituals. The 2012 presidential campaign starts a few days afterwards.

Story B: Pakistan secretly captures Bin Laden by bribing tribesmen. The US finds out by bribing Pakistani officials. Further bribes with foreign aid money get other Pakistani officials to issue a stand down order. The SEALS swoop in unopposed but somehow still lose a helicopter. They kill a captive Bin Laden as part of a deal to avoid exposing Saudi support for Al Qaeda. The media gets fed a cover story about the compound being a command center. Some doctor guy becomes a scapegoat and vaccination programs are derailed in all of Pakistan. The CIA fabricates documents from the compound and flirts with claiming credit for "enhanced interrogation" technique in the matter.

Yup, totally the same story. And it played no part in Obama's re-election campaign, did it?!

Bribing people to get key info is investigative and its what the CIA is supposed to do.

Yeah but the CIA didn't do it in B, why don't you read the article.

>Yup, totally the same story.

yep, Story A is just the shining facade with nice sausages on the shelves and the Story B is the rest of the sausage factory. There is no contradiction between those 2 stories, they dovetail together as parts of the same thing.

1. The implication that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had him under their control since 2006 is important. We were still neck-deep in two wars that were sold to the public in large part based on Afghanistan's unwillingness to hand him over. If true, it also provides more explicit verification that SA and Pakistan are terrible allies at best.

2. Setting aside the morality of assassination, it suggests that the reason we killed him wasn't out of necessity or even expedience - but rather to prevent him from talking about these so-called allies.

3. Rather than implicating Pakistan and its corrupt ISI services, we implicated a humanitarian medical mission and its lead doctor. I fail to see that as the lesser of evils.

There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by this story if it turns out to be factual.

I think we are lucky that the top comment even mentions Saudi Arabia, towards the end, in passing. The degree to which the mainstream works at misdirection away from the reality of Saudi Arabia becomes more and more profound by the year.

>If true, it also provides more explicit verification that SA and Pakistan are terrible allies at best.

This was already the world's worst kept secret. Anybody with more than a passing involvement in A-stan knows the Pakistanis, in particular, were working both sides of the street.

Another comment points out that it's crazy to call Bin Laden "elderly." (I am older than that, and I am not elderly.) But by all accounts he was a key figure, once a leader, of an international terrorist network. Even if he did not have operational control of Al Qaeda at the moment he was killed, he was a legitimate target for a military attack.

Whoa, I didn't realize he was only 54 when he died. There's nothing about 54 that's elderly; I used that word because the article did, and I guess I assumed he was much older.

Even so, being 'elderly' is irrelevant when the issue is holding enough political influence to do significant damage to others.

I think it matters because Zero Dark Thirty created the impression of heroic American intelligence operatives tracking down Bin Laden and engaging his body guards in a firefight. The reality is it was a mob style hit on an elderly man. We Americans have a tendency to glorify behavior that is in reality very ugly. This is a bad habit that leads to self-delusion.

rogerhoward makes some excellent points.

Some other things, assuming for the sake of discussion that this writeup is accurate:

1. It damages the relationship of the jackboot community and the administration: the SEALs were deployed to hit Bin Laden, and were told that this would be done without fanfare. Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation. This is not how proper clandestine things are done, one imagines.

2. It damages the relationship of the jackboots in particular and the administration: having to suffer the indignity of signing what is a effectively an NDA for premeditated murder--and then watching two folks get away with breaching it because it supports the new, official story--cannot have been easy for the folks involved in the raid.

3. It damages the State department's credibility (hah) with Pakistan. We agreed that steps would be taken to reinforce the government's position with its people, and that we wouldn't implicate them--they would save face. Instead, we put up a flimsy half-baked cover story, and decide not to go with one that leads to lots of easy questions, which will never have answers that are either convenient or satisfying. Look how Gates reacted during the thing--was not happy.

4. It damages the relation of the government and its people. As seen through the FOIA requests, it's pretty obvious that several parts of the story don't really jive. So, it's obvious that there is either bad record keeping in place, or a coverup of some sort. Not in the dramatic sense, mind you, but just minor misalignments of documented reality with official story.

~

The problem isn't that they had the guy whacked--it's that they perhaps did such a thoroughly and unneeded job of lying about it afterwards.

If you want to see how this sort of thing should be done, look at the Israelis.

Super minor grammar quibble: it's 'jibe,' not 'jive.'

Actually I grew up in my part of the country saying jive not jibe, never heard of the spelling with a "b" until recently. So yes for a lot of the US it's jive. Jive is a dance that pins on synchronicity, hence, I believe, the common (even if technically incorrect) application to comparison.

Apparently, "Jive" is a lot more common in the UK, but it's not unheard of in the United States.

http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-jibe

Still considered an "error" in the US, but, give it time. I've already started pronouncing aluminium like Jony.

> Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation.

That's because the helicopter crash threw the old plans out the window. Once there's physical evidence of the Americans' raid, you've got to get ahead of the story. Obama simply had no choice.

If they can't manage to deflect questions about one little misplaced helicopter, I rather think our intelligence apparatus is losing its touch.

Personally, I feel like this whole question is just one of many instances of information in the article that I find highly dubious.

This is Osama bin Laden. The US had been hunting him for years. There was no way that the president wasn't going to announce his death from the rooftops, and I have a hard time believing that any senior member of special ops thought otherwise. At those levels even the military officers are canny political operatives, they don't get their stars otherwise, and they would have known that this raid was going to be publicised.

So yeah, the fact that the White House was talking about this mission mere hours after its completion is a total non-surprise, and it would have been obvious to anyone involved that this would be the case, helicopter crash or not.

The State Department's credibility with Pakistan was dead the moment Panetta overruled (then-Ambassador Cameron) Munter and Hillary on the drone strikes (signature strikes as a name came later). You think Pasha was in DC visiting the State Department? The ISI was talking to DIA and CIA via Panetta and the American brass were dealing with the Pakistan brass.

>> but hey, we flew into another country and murdered an elderly man

And rightly so.