Posted: 31 Aug 2012 03:43 AM PDT
By Eric Schmitt, NY Times, August 29, 2012
WASHINGTON—A new first-person account of the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last year contradicts the Obama administration’s previous descriptions of the mission, raising questions about whether the leader of Al Qaeda posed a clear threat to the commandos who fired on him.
According to the account in the book, “No Easy Day,” which will go on sale next week under the pseudonym Mark Owen, Bin Laden was shot in the head when he peered out of his bedroom door into a top-floor hallway of his compound as the SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell toward him.
The author, whom military officials have identified as Matt Bissonnette, 36, said he was directly behind the “point man,” or lead commando, as the SEALs followed Bin Laden into the room, where they found him on the floor at the foot of his bed with “blood and brains spilled out of the side of his skull,” and two women wailing over his body, which was “still twitching and convulsing.”
The author said he and another member then trained their weapons on Bin Laden’s chest and fired several rounds, until he was motionless. The SEALs later found two unloaded weapons—an AK-47 rifle and a Makarov pistol—near the bedroom door.
In the administration’s version of events, the lead commando’s shot in the stairwell missed, and the SEALs confronted Bin Laden in the bedroom, killing him with one shot to the chest and another above the left eye.
The new book’s account, if true, raises the question of whether Bin Laden posed a clear threat in his death throes.
Military officials have said that the SEALs made split-second decisions, fearing that Bin Laden, though unarmed, could have exploded a suicide vest or other booby trap. Critics, however, say that while the military has described the raid as a “kill or capture” mission, there was virtually no chance the SEALS would bring Bin Laden back alive.
The Pentagon and the White House declined to comment on the new account, reflecting at least in part the administration’s reluctance to reopen an issue at a time when Republicans have accused the administration of exploiting the raid’s success to burnish President Obama’s national security credentials during his re-election campaign.
Elsewhere in the book, the author states that members of the SEALs unit were not “huge fans of Obama,” although they respected the commander in chief for authorizing the operation. “We just got this guy re-elected,” the author quotes another member of the unit, identified by the pseudonym Walt, as saying.
The Associated Press and The Huffington Post reported the new account of Bin Laden’s death on Wednesday after purchasing copies of the book. The New York Times obtained a copy later on Wednesday.
In response to a crush of news media attention, criticism and consumer demand, Dutton, the imprint of Penguin that acquired the book in secret, said this week that it was moving up the book’s planned Sept. 11 release date by one week, to Tuesday. Demand for the 336-page book has been enormous; it is currently No. 1 on the best-seller lists at Amazon.com and BN.com.
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