Questions, always questions

So Seal Team Six were the ones who raided the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2nd, 2011. Common knowledge now.
It was a carefully programmed successful effort to kill the man they deemed to be the terrorist leader of al Qaeda.
But now there are conflicting stories emerging about what actually happened. From Peter Bergen of CNN, a very reliable source and others jumping in now. But questions still appear.

One of the Seal Team Six members who arrived in the third floor bedroom and wrote a book on it (No Easy Day) says bin Laden was standing up and he shot him twice in the forehead.
A second man says (Esquire interview) bin Laden was lying wounded on the floor because he had been shot by someone outside through a window and he finished him off with two shots. A third seems to sort of agree with one. One said bin Laden was shot when he poked his head out the door as they stormed the building.

bin Laden's compound

There apparently was an instruction NOT to shoot bin Laden in the face because the CIA would need to analyze good pictures of bin Laden for its facial recognition experts to work effectively. And it was a CIA led operation.

That seems to imply that photographs were planned as part of the operation, yet none have surfaced.

Of course it was a lot easier to simply kill him right away, but would he have been a threat to 3 intensely trained and dangerous Navy Seals? We don't know if capture alive was an option for the team, but even wounded, wouldn't the CIA want the greatest intelligence prize ever in their grasp? Living breathing and talking? Would it have been a soldier's decision to finish him off? And as there were 23 Seal Team members ready to disappear back into the night skies via their helicopters to make their escape, why wouldn't they have just toted off bin Laden alive, to do what they wanted with him afterward? They evidently took his remains with them to be dropped into the sea.

Who IS this guy?

So while the Navy argues fore and aft about what exactly the three Seals were doing in that room. It would be totally easy to prove one or the other with a picture taken during the event. And now the building has been demolished since, so even blood remains on the floor cannot be analyzed for DNA. And no one says they saw any evidence of a dialysis machine. Bin Laden would have needed three times a week treatment.

One Seal says he shot him because he saw a weapon near. And another says the guns were discovered after a later search?
And one wonders, if bin Laden's bodyguards were involved in an intense firefight as the Team was entering the compound, why hadn't this savvy, internationally hunted terrorist not armed himself with one of those guns?

And then there is the old conspiracy theory that President Clinton got bin Laden long ago when he was thought to be hiding in caves in Tora Bora and they sent in a ton of cruise missiles and basically closed them all. And the succeeding theory that a photo-double had been used ever since. In order to keep the bogey man alive as a constantly ominous threat to America.

same man?

The old days of the truth will out are over. Too much fog to see clearly.
No information regarding evidence, such as DNA results or physical evidence etc, has been released to news organizations or the public, even through FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) requests.
And all records of the raid have since been transferred to a CIA 'black hole' immune from FOIA requests as 'operational files'. And even the Department of Defense has purged all it's records relating to the raid. Why?


Questions, always questions.





Of course this small query is in no way intended to denigrate the courage of the Seal Team Six men who put their lives on the line as they undertook a dangerous mission. Their bravery is a given.