Book: Bin Laden Executed Before Troops Even Tried to ID Him

White House Changed Story Several Times: Were Any of Them True?

May of 2011 was a month spent primarily trying to get straight the killing of Osama bin Laden, with the Obama Administration repeatedly changing its official story, starting with a “highly volatile firefight” and changing to killing bin Laden in the kitchen.

The new Navy SEAL book, which looks to be the final word on the matter, insomuch as it is the only firsthand account Americans are likely ever to see, suggests that not only were the early versions of the administration’s story nonsense, even their later, toned down ones were, and they never told the truth.

In this version, troops were headed upstairs and opened fire at a random person who stuck his head out of the door to see what the ruckus was. Finding him on the floor badly wounded, potentially dying, the troops fired several more rounds into his chest until he stopped moving. Then they interrogated a little girl to find out that the person they had just executed was bin Laden.

This opens up a whole can of worms, as nominally the troops were supposed to try to capture bin Laden for all the valuable intelligence he might conceivably have. But when the troops were executing him they didn’t know it was bin Laden to begin with, and made no attempt to find out, so if the intelligence on the house, which officials concede was a bit shaky, had turned out to be false, they had just murdered some random guy in a Pakistani house.

That is of course just the first step in a long trail of intrigue on the bin Laden raid and the Obama Administration’s deliberate and repeated deception related to it. Having killed instead of captured bin Laden, the Obama Administration claims they stuck him in a bag and hurled him into the sea somewhere. That too appears to be false, as Stratfor claimed knowledge (in leaked emails) of his body having been brought back to the US and to Dover Air Force Base, the same base which was embroiled in a scandal about mishandling corpses, including dumping slain US soldiers and unidentified 9/11 victims into a landfill as “medical waste.”

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.