White House seeks to scotch bin Laden questions (Shut Up and Drink Your Koolaid)
AFP
Officials have declined to give any further details of the raid against the Al-Qaeda leader, after being forced to amend earlier accounts of what exactly happened when Navy SEALS stole deep into Pakistan in a covert action on Sunday.
White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters on Air Force One that the operation was still being evaluated, but said that after transparently offering details of what happened, Washington was no longer offering public accounts.
"The broader point here is that a group of extraordinary US personnel flew into a foreign country in the dead of night and ... flawlessly executed a mission and achieved a goal that had eluded the United States of America since 9/11, almost 10 years," he said.
"We are still in the process of gathering all the facts of that operation," Carney said.
Adjustments to the story of the raid in Abbottabad, which began to be told late on Sunday, have seen the narrative embroidered with corrections and new details and left a sheaf of unanswered questions.
On Wednesday, however, the White House and the Pentagon called a halt to the disclosures, saying operational techniques that might be used in future raids needed to be protected.
At first, the White House said bin Laden was armed when he was shot dead in his compound in the Pakistani garrison town, not far from Islamabad.
But a day later, Carney corrected the account, saying the terror chief was unarmed when gunned down by a Navy SEAL. The disclosure raised doubts about the US assurances that they were ready to take bin Laden alive.
On Monday, John Brennan, President Barack Obama's counter-terror chief, said that bin Laden's wife had died after being used as a human shield in the attack, implying a cowardly act of self-defense by the the Al-Qaeda leader.
Officials soon rowed back from that story too and Carney provided a new version of events on Tuesday, indicating that bin Laden's wife had voluntarily rushed a Navy SEAL confronting her husband and was injured but still alive.
There have been differing accounts also over a fifth fatality in the raid, originally said to be bin Laden's son.
May 5, 2011
http://wires.univision.com/english/article/2011-05-05/white-house-seeks-to-scotch