New book details U.S. mission to find Osama bin Laden
By Karen DeYoung, WashPost, Published: April 27
Six weeks before the raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden last May, President Obama’s top national security officials debated various other options, including dropping an experimental small bomb on the al-Qaeda leader inside his Pakistani fortress, obliterating the compound with a B-2 bomber or inviting the Pakistanis to conduct a joint operation.
While some favored the small bomb option, including then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, others persuasively argued that the mini-bomb might miss or that there would be no way to prove to the world that bin Laden had been killed, according to a new book by bin Laden expert Peter Bergen.
“I think we have hung our hopes on sophisticated new technologies sometimes too soon that don’t work out,” Adm. Mike Mullen, then the Joint Chiefs chairman, told Bergen of the March 14 debate within the president’s war cabinet.
The book, “Manhunt. The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad,” is scheduled for publication Tuesday, the first anniversary of bin Laden’s death.
(More here.)
Six weeks before the raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden last May, President Obama’s top national security officials debated various other options, including dropping an experimental small bomb on the al-Qaeda leader inside his Pakistani fortress, obliterating the compound with a B-2 bomber or inviting the Pakistanis to conduct a joint operation.
While some favored the small bomb option, including then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, others persuasively argued that the mini-bomb might miss or that there would be no way to prove to the world that bin Laden had been killed, according to a new book by bin Laden expert Peter Bergen.
“I think we have hung our hopes on sophisticated new technologies sometimes too soon that don’t work out,” Adm. Mike Mullen, then the Joint Chiefs chairman, told Bergen of the March 14 debate within the president’s war cabinet.
The book, “Manhunt. The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad,” is scheduled for publication Tuesday, the first anniversary of bin Laden’s death.
(More here.)
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