How many versions of this killing is the government going to come up with?

The Slippery Story of the bin Laden Kill
By Garance Franke-Ruta

The early narrative of the assault on Osama bin Laden had him using his wife as a human shield and firing from behind her. Now we learn he wasn't armed.

The White House Tuesday blamed "the fog of war" for conflicting statements in its recounting of the events surrounding the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but the history of misstatements from U.S. government officials about various combat operations raises questions about whether briefers also were subjecting us to a counterterrorism strategy and not just completely confused in their initial statements.

Consider the narrative put forward by John Brennan, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, in a televised briefing the Associated Press described as an "uncharacteristically candid exchange with reporters."

"Thinking about that from a visual perspective, 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," Brennan told the world from the White House podium Monday. "I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years."

There was a firefight and the al-Qaeda leader was "killed in that firefight," Brennan said. There was a woman who was used "to shield bin Laden from the incoming fire." The woman killed in the raid was bin Laden's wife, Brennan said: "She was positioned in a way that indicated that she was being used as a shield."

And bin Laden was killed because he resisted capture. "If we had the opportunity to take him alive, we would have done that," Brennan told reporters at the briefing.

"Looking at what bin Laden was doing hiding there while he's putting other people out there to carry out attacks again just speaks to, I think, the nature of the individual he was," Brennan said.

And that's the message our counterterrorism officials would, I expect, like the world -- and especially any potential followers of al-Qaeda's anti-American ideology -- to get about our newly vanquished enemy, responsible to the single deadliest attack on American soil. The leader of the terrorist group was soft, a coward in the end who hid behind a woman's skirts like a little girl, having grown accustomed to living in luxury in a mansion. Almost everything about this narrative seemed calculated to diminish any possible perception of strength or masculinity in bin Laden's reaction to the raid by an elite team of U.S. Navy Seals -- men who are in contrast among the most mythic and valorized in our armed forces, known for slogans like "pain is just weakness leaving the body."

Link:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/the-slippery-story-of-the-bin-laden-kill/238261/