Washington – Killing Osama bin Laden was a big victory for the U.S., but how exactly the raid went down is another story — and another, and another.
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Over two days, the White House has offered contradictory versions of events, including misidentifying which of bin Laden’s sons was killed and wrongly saying bin Laden’s wife died in gunfire, as it tries to sort through what the president’s press secretary called the “fog of combat” and produce an accurate account.
Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that officials were trying to get information out as quickly as possible about the complex event witnessed by just a handful of people, and the story line was being corrected.
“We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you. … And obviously some of the information was, came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on,” Carney said.
The contradictions and misstatements reflect the fact that even in the case of a highly successful and popular mission, the confusion inherent in a fast-paced, unpredictable military raid conducted under intense pressure in a foreign country does not lend itself immediately to a tidy story line, some experts said.
“People are demanding the equivalent of a movie, they want to know scene by scene the most trivial details. You’re in the middle of a combat operation,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“One of the things we all have to be careful about is the idea that you can suddenly rush to transparency and understanding in a matter of minutes or hours on the first day of an event like this.”
The circumstances for the Navy SEALs involved hardly lent themselves to careful note-taking. One of their helicopters stalled even before they rushed bin Laden’s compound, entering different rooms from different angles, not knowing who they’d find and then, according to the White House, engaging in a firefight. Some of what happened during those 40 minutes in Abbottabad, Pakistan, may never be known.
Nevertheless, the contradictory statements seem certain to raise suspicions about the White House’s version of events, given that no independent account from another source is likely to emerge. The only non-U.S. witnesses to survive the raid are in Pakistani custody.
Some of the White House contradictions and corrections that have emerged so far:
—White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told reporters Monday that bin Laden’s son Khalid was killed in the raid. When the White House released a transcript of Brennan’s briefing, the name had been corrected to that of another son, Hamza.
—Brennan said bin Laden’s wife died while shielding the terrorist leader from U.S. gunfire. Carney said Tuesday that the wife hadn’t died and was merely shot in the leg, although another woman did die. But it wasn’t clear that either of them was trying to shield bin Laden.
—Brennan and other officials suggested that bin Laden was holding a gun and even firing at U.S. forces. Carney said Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed.
—Officials have offered varying accounts of how President Barack Obama and his team in the White House Situation Room were able to monitor the raid. Without providing details on the technology involved, Brennan said that “we were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation from its commencement to its time on target to the extraction of the remains and to then the egress off of the target.”
CIA Director Leon Panetta told PBS on Tuesday that “Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”
—The night of the raid, administration officials held a telephone briefing for reporters. “During the raid, we lost one helicopter due to mechanical failure,” one of the administration officials said. Later in the same call, another official contradicted that: “We didn’t say it was mechanical.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, clarified Tuesday that the explanation was more technical: The air temperature in the compound was hotter than expected and the helicopter was too heavy to stay aloft under that condition.
Going to sleep. Please wake me up when the final version is released.
I believe that the administration purposly wants the story to come out slowly to make sure this stays in the headlines for a while, since this brings good publicity for the president
Osama bin ladin is dead a while ago, US officials confirmed it by DNA or another way but they need to prove it somehow that people should belive that he is dead, the white house came up with an idea!
To raid a compound in a “city” (check it out on google maps) 800 meters away from an army basy (an average street in brooklyn) and kill some poor guy and throw him in to the sea, and oilem goilem belives it was osama bin ladin….
How come there is no pictures (when USA killed saddams sons all pictures where out no matter how bad it looked.
The compound with the biggest complex in the city, noboddy was wondering what’s going on inside there?
Major contidictions in the reports…
Do the math!!!
Who cares about the details. He is dead and thats all that matters.
If they were to tell the truth then we wouldn’t have the problem, but when you try to make it up then you get this result.
When you tell the truth there is only one “emes”. When telling a lie, it will seldom match up.
What is going on here? I believe OBL is dead. But what was going on there sounds very fishy.
(Is this why OBL has been fed to the fish?).
of course they cant get their stories straight this whole assassination is a hoax.. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto said, (before she was assassinated in 2007) that Osama has been dead for years..This whole retarded saga is an invention of the CIA….even if they release photos of his death, it only means that they either killed him years ago or that they created pictures of him to fool the masses..Sorry people but this osama bin laden hunt and war was only to make a select group of people even more wealthy then they already were…And by the way 9/11 was an inside job, its all there…how can anyone deny it..people, their is so much evidence its scary… ……do a little bit of research and you’ll see for yourself how the official Government version of 9/11 has more holes in it then your window screen that blocks the bugs from coming into your house……
Too much of a big deal is being made of a number of minor and/or technical discrepancies. For example, If there is a robbery at a bank, and there are a number of eyewitnesses, there is bound to be of different versions of the same event (i.e. how many suspects, how many guns, how many shots were fired, who fired first, different descriptions of the suspects, how long the robbery lasted, etc.). In this case, justice was done. The Talmud states that if someone comes to kill you, kill him first. Case closed!
I don’t care how the raid went down, thank god he’s dead!
I’m open minded, but with all this I can see where the conspirasists are coming from,,,,,
Actually, if it had been a conspiracy, there would not be any contradictions. All the details would match up perfectly.
This is so unbelievably funny. All the reports are not even in yet, over 2 dozen WH “officials” who may or may not have all the facts have been speaking to the media.
This is what happens in today’s world. We want the information and we want it now. It doesn’t matter how credible or accurate it is. Obama’s people should have held back some until the reports were complete and an accurate accounting of the events had been documented.
FYI: In the days following Husein’s capture, there were also many inconsistencies in the various stories we were hearing from the media (you can go back and check).
The biggest joke is all the paranoid tin hatters with their conspiracy theories. They will be ignorned now like they have in the past while the make fools of themselves and march in the Glen Beck/Rush Limbaugh/Donald Trump circus parade. I feel sorry for their friends and families but America is a great country and everyone has a constitutional right to make fools of themselves.
They make it up as they go along
He’s dead, get over it.
The operation was highly complex, involving a number of US agencies and some very brave soldiers on the ground.
The coordination, timing, and choreography required was incredible. There were a myriad of things that had to happen at the right place at the right time, and there were several things that had to NOT happen at the right place at the right time. All of it came to pass flawlessly. (Don’t worry about the dead helicopter, it had a very minor effect on the operation.)
To a goy, it was a fantastically successful operation pulled off by the finest military and intelligence operation in the world.
To a Yid, it was certainly a fantastically successful operation pulled off by the finest military and intelligence operation in the world. However, the bottom line is it is yet another example of the awesome Hashgachah. HKB”H was gozer that the rasha’s time was up, and the US was simply the shali’ach to make it happen. If the rasha’s time was not up, the operation would have failed.