The reported assassination of Osama bin Laden that began with a US military helicopter crash in a neighborhood in Pakistan, prompted one soldier involved in the raid to say “when we crashed there, we joked it was as good a place as any to find bin Laden. Who knew?” Later, the soldier denied making those remarks, and has not spoken further to the press. Officials have since indicated that a single tip-off call led to the raid, “not the fact that a helicopter crashed en route to the official staging ground.” The words “official staging ground” have since been retracted and replaced with “operational site”.
Bin Laden’s body has since been reportedly dropped into the ocean in what the White House is calling a “burial at sea”, though some have speculated that an imposter was deposited in the ocean, and the administration either still has the real bin Laden’s body, or the real bin Laden wasn’t actually present at the raid. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said of the action that, “we wanted to lay to rest any question as to whether we really got bin Laden, and getting rid of his body for good, buried those answers at sea. Bin Laden sleeps with the fishes.” The US State Department later issued a revision of Clinton’s statement, to the effect that “Keeping bin Laden’s dead body around could have been a threat to the security of the United States and this administration.” The State Department later retracted the phrase “and this administration”. As of this printing, both Clinton and the State Department deny making any statement at all.
Anyone in and around the alleged bin Laden compound in Pakistan has been arrested and are expected to soon correct their stories from the consensus ‘there was no one of importance living there – we thought it was a safe house for US intelligence assets’ (from an interview prior to the arrests) to support of the official report that ‘it was always a little suspicious – something was going on around here, but we never realized it was bin Laden’ (the same person seven hours later).
US officials, who prefer to be lumped together rather than identified for their various low level roles in US government, report that the assassination also averted another 9/11 like event – this time on trains, “because so many Americans actually use trains”. Meanwhile, officials, again choosing not to be named, have said “Any suspicion, talk of things being fishy, or just comic disbelief based on the absurdity of the official account, is unwarranted. Stuff like this happens all the time. You’ve seen that episode of 24, right?”
The parallels between the bin Laden raid and a few fictional television program episodes, analyzed in the Washington Post, is unfortunate for the administration in the wake of revelations that the US government has changed its account of the events several times just in the last 48hrs. First the CIA claimed bin Laden was armed and died in a firefight, using a woman as a human shield. Then the Pentagon admitted that the only shots fired were when the Seals charging the house shot and killed the woman and the courier allegedly responsible for providing the tip. The CIA later said that bin Laden was not armed, but had resisted by having a menacing attitude. The woman also has been variably presented as bin Laden’s wife, his daughter, and once as actually a male and bin Laden’s son. A made for TV movie called “Kill Bin Laden” is expected to come out with the final version of the State Department’s preferred story, and cement that in the public consciousness sometime in the Fall. Until then, “debates about the script are bound to happen” said director Kathryn Bigelow.