As the Obama administration debates whether to release photographic evidence that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, new details of the raid on bin Laden’s compound emerged Tuesday that suggest the operation was more of an execution than the White House had previously acknowledged. Bin Laden didn’t use his wife as a human shield when Navy SEALs charged into a third-floor room of his home in Pakistan and shot him in the head, as John Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism chief, reported Monday.
Nor did bin Laden brandish a gun, a knife, or any other weapon, White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed.
The al Qaeda leader was, in fact, unarmed and his wife rushed at the SEALs on her own accord. The Americans shot her in the leg before aiming for her husband.
But the White House maintains that Sunday’s raid was a capture-or-kill operation and says U.S. forces were instructed to take the al Qaeda leader alive unless he resisted.
“If we had the opportunity to take him alive, we would have done that,” Brennan said. But “he was engaged, and he was killed in the process.”
When pressed for details on the extent of bin Laden’s engagement, Carney said, “There were many other people who were armed in the region — I mean, in the compound. … It was a highly volatile firefight.”
“Even I’m getting confused,” Carney said at one point, referring additional questions to the Pentagon.
Before finding bin Laden on the third floor of his compound in Pakistan, the team of SEALs shot and killed two men and one woman on the building’s first floor.
They were engaged in a continuous firefight for the 40 minutes they were on the ground inside the compound, according to Carney.
As details continue to emerge on the play-by-play of operation — much of which Obama and his aides watched on a live video feed at the White House — skeptics are pressuring the White House for photographic evidence of bin Laden’s bloodied body.
White House officials say they are concerned that the pictures would invite a violent backlash from the al Qaeda leader’s supporters.
“It’s fair to say that it’s a gruesome photograph,” Carney said. White House officials are deciding whether hard evidence of the killing would serve a purpose beyond the harm it could cause “not just domestically, but globally,” Carney said.
“There is not some roiling debate here about this,” he said. “There is simply a discussion about what the appropriate action should be.”
Whether or not the White House releases the photographs, U.S. officials are bracing for the possibility of a counterattack by al Qaeda.
“We anticipate the potential for a backlash … at least a desire if not the ability to exact some kind of revenge on the United States,” Carney said.
But intelligence officials see no reason to raise the country’s threat level, he added.
