Bin Laden’s death: Did the White House alter the story?

Remember the official White House version of how Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden? said Cynthia Fagen in the New York Post. It was not entirely true. So says Matt Bissonnette, a former Navy SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout. After quickly forcing their way into the al Qaida leader’s compound, Bissonnette says, he and other members of SEAL Team Six saw bin Laden’s head poke out from a third-floor bedroom. The lead commando fired at him twice. The SEALs then entered the bedroom, and saw that bin Laden had been hit. The terrorist leader was in his death throes, convulsing on the floor, blood and brains spilling out of his skull. Bissonnette and another SEAL finished him off with several shots to the chest. Bissonnette’s book differs from the White House version in several key ways, said Marcus Baram in HuffingtonPost.com. Americans were told that bin Laden was standing when the SEALs entered his bedroom, with one of his wives shielding him—leading SEALs to fear that he was going for a weapon. But bin Laden never posed any threat to the SEALs who blew him away. Bin Laden “hadn’t even prepared a defense,” Bissonnette writes. “He had no intention of fighting.”

Bissonnette’s book is already on the way to best-sellerdom, said Mark Thompson in Time.com, but the price for his disclosures may be steep. The Pentagon’s top lawyer last week wrote to “Mark Owen”—the pseudonym used by the author—warning that he could be prosecuted for violating the nondisclosure agreements he signed when joining and leaving the SEALs. What’s worse, said Eli Lake in TheDailyBeast.com, is that Bissonnette broke SEAL Team Six’s “Mafia-like code” of silence. Ex-special-operations members are required to submit their memoirs to the Pentagon before publication, so that they can be scrubbed of classified information. The author skipped that step, and so might have unwittingly released details that could endanger SEALs and their families. “Most of us are just stunned right now,” said former Army Special Forces officer Roger Carstens.

What’s really stunning is the hypocrisy of Bissonnette’s critics, said Owen West in The Wall Street Journal. Former SEALs have written dozens of books. The action movie blockbuster Act of Valor—which took in $80 million this year—starred active-duty SEALs and was developed with the Navy’s cooperation. And the biggest leaks about the bin Laden operation came directly from “the inner council of President Obama,” whose self-serving blabbing led to the jailing of a Pakistani doctor who’d helped confirm bin Laden’s location. Still, Bissonnette should have expected this kind of backlash, said Ben Macintyre in The Times (U.K.). In his book, Bissonnette says the SEALs knew that Obama would want full credit. “We’ll get Obama re-elected for sure,” the author quotes one commando as saying. “I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden.”

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Obama took a big political risk in ordering the operation, and deserves his share of credit, said David Uberti in HuffingtonPost.com. But I’m troubled by how White House officials apparently altered the account of the raid. Were they trying to make it sound less brutal—less like an assassination? Bin Laden “signed his death warrant on Sept. 11, 2001,” and the SEALs needed no excuse to kill him. One can only wonder why this “administration doesn’t trust its own public to digest the truth, even with something as easy to swallow as the death of its greatest enemy.”