'I'd Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This' (history of the bin Laden raid)

[Nevilledog]

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Garrett M. Graff
@vermontgmg
THREAD: In reporting my new oral history of the bin Laden raid, I was struck again & again about the incredible cloak of secrecy thrown around this operation. Five remarkable details of just how secret—and important—OPERATION NEPTUNE'S SPEAR truly was:

‘I’d Never Been Involved in Anything as Secret as This’
The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room.
politico.com
10:48 AM · Apr 30, 2021

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/30/osama-bin-laden-death-white-house-oral-history-484793

On the morning of May 1, 2011, most Americans had never heard of Abbottabad. By that night, the dusty midsize city near the mountains of northwest Pakistan was the center of the biggest story in the world. A team of U.S. Navy SEALs had just descended by helicopter on a high-walled mansion there in the dark of night, located the globe’s most hunted man and killed him.

The effort to track and execute Osama bin Laden, which took place 10 years ago this weekend, was the most closely held operational secret in modern American history—a highly sensitive, politically fraught and physically risky mission that involved breaching the sovereign territory of a purported U.S. ally to target an icon of international violence and terror.

Once his death was announced in a hastily organized late Sunday night presidential address, much of the initial attention focused on the bravery and skill of the SEAL operators who flew in and conducted the attack. Other popular culture, like the movie Zero Dark Thirty, would later center on the years of work by the analysts who traced the elusive bin Laden to his compound. But the operation also stands as a fascinating window into the most rarefied zone of presidential decision-making: Barack Obama had sole authority to approve an act with huge consequences and huge risks, one that could easily sink his presidency if it went bad. And, with a decade’s hindsight, there was another consequential domestic political subplot at work that week, too: On the day between when Obama approved the operation and when Seal Team Six helicoptered in, the president kept a long-scheduled date at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where he publicly roasted celebrity real estate developer-turned-TV host Donald Trump for pumping up the “birther” conspiracy theory that he wasn’t a real citizen.

President Barack Obama discusses the mission against Osama bin Laden with his national security team in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. | Pete Souza/White House
The bin Laden raid that President Obama greenlit that Friday in late April—code-named Operation Neptune’s Spear—was the culmination of months of intricate preparation that reached across the capital and around the globe, from full-scale SEAL dress rehearsals in North Carolina to deep Washington legal debates over whether the mission would be “kill or capture,” all planned around a small, precise physical model of the Abbottabad compound that traveled back and forth from CIA headquarters in suburban Virginia to the West Wing. The tense moments as the raid unfolded half a world away yielded one of the most famous inside-the-room photographs in presidential history, Pete Souza’s portrait of 14 people crammed into a White House Situation Room anteroom—a moment of high drama that included Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and two future current Cabinet secretaries.


*snip*

[underpants]

1. Awesome

Thanks

[mobeau69]

2. Great read!

Jay Carney: “that birther shit” “carnival barker” LMAO

[tinrobot]

3. Read it this morning. Highly recommended.

I like the little tidbit that they didn't know for sure if it was Bin Laden until the head of the Pakistani army called to congratulate them on taking him out.

[Nevilledog]

4. Kicking because this is a great read

[Hekate]

5. A very good read, thanks. At the end, the recollections of the celebrations outside the White House

...I remember that sense of: my gods we did it.

Then I remembered the usual suspects at DU, the few contrarians who just had to scold the rest of us for “celebrating a man’s death.” I feel now as I felt then: some people deserve to have their death celebrated, and the man responsible for god knows how many people leaping from the upper floors of the Twin Towers plus several thousand burning to death inside is one of those.

[MissMillie]

6. NPR did a story on this yesterday (or maybe this morning)

But a lot of what they talked about was not getting Pakistan's permission to go in.

[tinymontgomery]

7. Kick, great read. n/t

[winstars]

8. Amazing article, everyone should read it....