9781422277164

On December 14, 2010, Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, visited Obama at the White House. Panetta, a former congressman who later served in Presi- dent Bill Clinton’s administration, laid out the evidence for Obama. The president sat and listened, weighing every scrap of information he heard. It was all circumstantial . “For all we know, this could be some sheik hiding from his wife,” the president told Panetta, according to an account of the conversation that appears in Mark Bowden’s book The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden . Be cautious, the president urged, and above all, be right. In the meantime, the president ordered Panetta to prepare a list of options for a possible attack on the compound. One of those options? Calling on an elite US Navy Special Forces unit— the SEALs. Hide and Seek Where had Osama bin Laden been hiding for nearly a decade? That question burned everyday in the minds of US military and intelligence officials. A psychic kept sending letters claiming she had “visions” of bin Laden staying at a swanky London hotel. Others thought the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was dead, murdered by the Pakistani military, who kept his death secret so the country could still rake in Western money for the fight on terror. The cold, hard fact, however, was that for nearly a decade, no one knew whether bin Laden was dead or alive. They certainly did not know where he might be hiding.

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