Getting Bin Laden: Who Cares if He Fought Back?
So this is what it comes down to: a former SEAL who participated in the mission to kill Osama bin Laden charges in his new book that the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people was simply killed when he stuck his head out of his bedroom door. He allegedly didn’t resist, as White House and Pentagon officials said he had in the hours and days following the May 2, 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The press goes wild:
SEAL’s book: Bin Laden shot on sight, the Washington Post says.
Osama bin Laden was killed by bullet to the brain before Navy SEALs arrived, book reveals, says the New York Daily News.
SEAL book raises questions about bin Laden’s death, Businessweek says.
They’re all reacting to stories by the Associated Press and the Huffington Post, who bought copies of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden at local bookstores. Ex-SEAL Matt Bissonnette has written the book, published by Dutton, under the pseudonym Mark Owen. Its official release date was moved from Sept. 11 to Sept. 4 on Tuesday.
Bissonnette says he was right behind the “point man” as the SEAL team climbed the stairs in the bin Laden compound leading to his bedroom when he heard the muffled pops of a silencer equipped firearm. The point man, Bissonnette reports, fired when he spied a “man peeking out of the door” at the top of the stairs. The man - bin Laden - toppled back into the room. By the time the SEALs got to him, he had fallen to the floor with a bullet wound to the right side of his head. The SEALs trained their guns on the still-alive bin Laden and fired into him several times until they were sure he was dead.
Whether or not bin Laden was armed is irrelevant. The U.S. military considered bombing his compound to smithereens with him and his family inside it, and whether or not he was armed at the time would have been moot. But the U.S., to put it bluntly, wanted proof of bin Laden’s demise that a bombing could not guarantee. They wanted his corpse.
Most Americans cheered bin Laden’s death, and will probably cheer louder once they know how he died: as a cowering coward, with two women in his bed chamber.
The problem with the story as it is now being told is a problem we have lived with since the dawn of government: governments often fudge the truth. In fact, sometimes they lie. It appears that may have happened in this case…
