The Seals, The Mission

[marshabar1]

Things went sour from the start. As the helicopters launched from the U.S. base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and crossed the border into Pakistan, one helicopter and the Navy SEAL team members it carried had to abort their mission and return to base after mechanical difficulties. The remaining helicopters had to carry on by themselves. As they neared the target in the city of Abbottabad, Pakistani air defenses spotted the chopper and began firing. The strike team avoided the fire and kept going but encountered stiff resistance when it landed, because the building's inhabitants had been tipped off.

The helicopters' propellers blew an intense heat onto the SEALs as they landed near the compound and sprinted to their assigned breach points. Like a finely tuned orchestra, the SEALs set and simultaneously detonated several breach charges around the compound's courtyard and flooded inside. The tipped-off inhabitants stood ready, wounding several of the SEALs with a withering fire as they poured in. But the SEALs' specially designed weapons and their reflexive sharp-shooting skills developed from hundreds of missions proved too much for the waiting guards. The SEALs eliminated the threats in the courtyard and prepared to enter the target building. . . . .


www.slate.com/id/2293022/

[Mad Dawg Wiccan]

Good article.

[floridayankee]

Sort of. It's actually as the title of the article says:

The Debacle That Didn't Happen

It was a pretty good story though.

[marshabar1]

First we hunt you down. Then we blow a hole in your face. Then we your body in the sea, where no one can find your grave. Then we destroy the last thing left of you: your reputation.

This isn't cruelty. It's strategy. Al-Qaida's greatest strength—diffusion—is also its greatest weakness. It's a scattered network held together by the legend of Osama Bin Laden. We took his life. Now we're out to liquidate his legend.

John Brennan, President Obama's counterterrorism coordinator, understands this. Killing Bin Laden was only the first step. The next step is to use his death to demoralize and divide his followers. "We have a lot better opportunity now that … Bin Laden is out of there to destroy that organization, create fractures within it," Brennan said at a White House briefing Monday. "The number two, Zawahiri, is not charismatic. … You're going to see them start eating themselves from within."

To accelerate this fratricide, Brennan issued a damning account of Bin Laden's behavior during the raid on his compound. "He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in," said Brennan. During this shootout, "there was a female who was in fact in the line of fire that reportedly was used … to shield bin Laden." Brennan concluded:

Here is Bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.

www.slate.com/id/2293009/