A 1963 VW Beetle pulls up outside the compound. 10 Navy SEALS emerge from the Bug dressed as circus clowns. One of them launches a RPCP (Rocket Propelled Cream Pie) at bin Laden but misses. One of the other SEALS/clowns manages to get within point blank range of bin Laden and takes him out with his squirting flower directly to the eyes. Osama clutches his eyes staggering around slips on a banana peel carooms off the end of a balcony and SPLAT!
A fellow dressed as Porky Pig shows up takes a few photos for proof before saying "That's all folks!"
In all seriousness, I mean no disrespect to the intelligence agents who were able to locate him nor the Navy SEALS who were inevitably able to take him out. I'm more fed up with the way the story has been (mis)handled by the Obama Administration and/or the press. While I believe most of the blame for how the story has been mis-handled is the fault of the press. Some fault does fall on the White House for not doing a better job of controlling the message and making sure the message given to the media was a consistent one.
Don't get me wrong, Obama deserves tremendous accolades for bringing down Obama. I may disagree with many of his political views but I have nothing but the utmost respect for how he handled the assassination of bin Laden. It was a job well done.
Where he's dropping the ball is on the PR side of things. On Sunday night the regularly scheduled programming was cut into at about 10:45 ET indicating that bin Laden had been killed and the president was going to address the nation. For over 45 minutes the American public was fed information indicating bin Laden had been killed, that he'd fired upon Navy SEALS and had been killed when they returned fire. Various people from the Bush & Clinton Administrations and the intelligence community were interviewed for their reactions. Then we were told that he used one of his wives as a human shield before he was taken out. The next day the story started to change. To borrow a term from comic book parlance, the original story was "retconned" by the media by Monday morning with no acknowledgement from them that their story from the previous evening had changed. In the new version, bin Laden was unarmed and his youngest wife had been shot in the hip when she rushed one of the Navy SEALS unarmed in an attempt to save her husband.
I realize that in the age of 24 hour news and each news agency doing their damnedest to scoop their competition ("Facts be damned! It's all about being first! We can always print a retraction later.") "sitting on" the information a little longer before announcing it to the press (thus less air time of media speculation and reaction interviews with intelligence officials) might or might not have been a feasible option. I can also understand where Obama and the others in the room who watched the events as they happened would have been excited that we finally got bin Laden and would have wanted to share that news with the world posthaste! But a few ounces of caution and planning would have gone a long way in the delivery of the information as accurately as possible the first time and would likely have reduced if not completely eliminated the various alternate versions of the story that the news media started delivering to the public.
I do have to reiterate that most of the blame for the bungling of this story lands on the lap of the US media and not within the White House. The White House only failed in their control of the delivery of the message to the media. However, in so failing it allowed and led to the media running wild with both information and misinformation as our media has shown themselves to be increasingly more prone to do.
