WASHINGTON—It is unlikely many Americans will lose sleep over the distinction, but as the fog of war lifts and anger at Pakistan builds, the death of Osama bin Laden now appears to constitute outright execution.
The White House adjusted its narrative Tuesday, taking a phantom gun out of bin Laden’s hands with the admission Al Qaeda’s founder was in fact unarmed in the dying seconds of the early Monday takedown, contrary to earlier accounts.
Yet bin Laden “resisted,” according to White House spokesman Jay Carney. It was left unexplained what resistance the weaponless terror ringleader offered Navy SEAL Team 6, arguable the world’s best-trained commandos.
The fog has yet to lift, meanwhile, over precisely what President Barack Obama and his inner circle actually saw in the White House situation room as they locked eyes on a video screen, following the raid minute-by-minute in a state of high anxiety.
A live video feed from Abbottabad via helmet-cam? It seems so. Administration officials confirm a blend of live audio, video and text/email data was flowing to the President. But they insist Obama was not a virtual witness to fatal shots — one to the chest, another to the head, that brought down bin Laden.
The revised narrative emerged Tuesday amid rising anger in Washington, where suspicion festered over possible Pakistani complicity in bin Laden’s refuge.
And it came as pressure mounted for Team Obama to release military photographs of the corpse — photos the White House itself describes as “gruesome” — to satisfy demands for verification.
CIA director Leon Panetta stepped into the centre of the fast-moving story Tuesday, vowing that the photo evidence would “ultimately” be released. But a senior White House adviser said the timing was delicate, amid concerns the graphic images — one is thought to show bin Laden’s bloody face shattered from a high-velocity bullet between the eyes — would be “subject to misuse and propagandization” by enemies.
Later, during a closed-door briefing to the U.S. Congress on the operation, Panetta reportedly said of Pakistan’s role in shielding bin Laden, “either they were involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be.”
Others in Congress were more open in their demands for a fuller accounting from Pakistan, pressing for an immediate freeze in U.S. aid — estimated at $20 billion since the attacks of 9/11. The fury transcends party lines, at least among rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans. But party leadership on both sides is more muted, though apparently no less frustrated, as it ponders America’s post-bin Laden relationship with Pakistan.
Panetta, in his first interview since the mission, told Time magazine the CIA flatly ruled out enlisting its wobbly ally months before the raid, saying, “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”
Embarrassed Pakistani government officials are scrambling to refute the allegations, insisting its ISI intelligence service had the garrison town of Abbottabad in its gaze, successfully locating other terror suspects there and sharing other information with U.S. counterparts. But the chorus of contempt in Washington showed the relationship badly frayed.
Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who was in power when bin Laden is thought to have moved to Abbottabad, insisted the failure to locate the Al Qaeda leader until now is not Pakistan’s fault alone.
“If we continuously keep blaming the army and the ISI for what they have not been able to do, well, if they haven’t been able to do it, then it’s CIA’s failure also,” he told CBS News.
Panetta rattled yet another branch of the fast-moving story, saying information extracted through “enhanced interrogation techniques” — including waterboarding — led to the mission’s success. Team Obama renounced most if not all of those techniques upon taking office, citing them as unworthy of American ideals.
“Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question,” Panetta told NBC.
A certain degree of opacity now clearly is what the White House is aiming for, as it moves to underpin the basics of what happened, keep the gory details at a sensitive distance and remind everyone of the outcome.
The raid was just one of dozens of classified ops undertaken by U.S. special forces and never reported, all of them involving terror targets who, if not of lower value, remain largely off the public radar. The indelicate details are classified, often forever.
It is left to White House loyalists like national security adviser Dennis McDonough to keep American minds focused on ends as opposed to means. In a series of interviews Tuesday, McDonough challenged the link between waterboarding and bin Laden’s death, at one point calling it “a sideshow.”
Such questions are “a distraction from the larger, very positive story to tell here about what our intelligence people achieved,” McDonough told NPR.
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