The White House account of the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden has been changing almost daily since the last shot was fired, and the administration’s claim that it was a capture-or-kill mission has come into question as new details emerge. Administration officials repeatedly described the operation as a “continuous” firefight that lasted 40 minutes from the moment the Navy SEALs landed in bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan until they left with his dead body.
“They were engaged in a firefight throughout the operations,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday. “The resistance was consistent from the moment they landed until the end of the operation.”
A senior Pentagon official backed up the claim, saying, “For most of the period, there was a firefight.”
Officials later revealed that the SEALs killed a man who fired at them when they landed in the compound, but they did not take any additional fire for the remainder of the operation.
When the Americans moved into bin Laden’s house, they began clearing it floor by floor. They killed one man whom they believed was preparing to fire a weapon and killed another who lunged at them.
That’s not how CIA Director Leon Panetta described it. He told PBS on Tuesday, “There were some firefights that were going on as these guys were making their way up the staircase of that compound.”
When the SEALs got to the third floor of the compound, they found bin Laden unarmed, contrary to what U.S. counterterrorism chief John Brennan had said less than 24 hours after the raid.
“[Bin Laden] was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in,” Brennan said. He also said bin Laden used one of his wives as a shield — but Carney later corrected that report, saying the woman had lunged at the SEALs on her own accord.
By midweek, the administration gave up trying to get the narrative right and instead clammed up, just as the United Nations’ top human-rights official began questioning the legality of the mission.
“There is simply no question that this operation was lawful,” Carney said. “The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender.”
The White House has offered no evidence that bin Laden or the three other unarmed people killed in the raid were given a chance to surrender, though there’s no indication that the American public, relieved that the decade-long hunt for the al Qaeda leader, is concerned about it.
Obama will meet with members of the SEALs team that carried out the mission during a visit to Fort Campbell, Ky., on Friday.
U.S. law permits American forces to enter another country and destroy a lawful target such as bin Laden, as long as they don’t inflict civilian casualties. There’s some confusion, however, over whether a high-level target who has been indicted for war crimes — as bin Laden was — should be treated as a criminal suspect, according to military law experts.
Carney refused to answer further questions on Thursday regarding the administration’s inconsistencies, saying his answers could endanger national security — just in case the military wants to carry out the exact same operation somewhere else.
