No surrender: Obama was ready to 'rain hell' on Pakistan during bin Laden raid
US President Barack Obama planned to "rain hell" on the Pakistani military if they surrounded the team tasked with killin Osama bin Laden.
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An exhaustive account of the Abbottabad raid in Esquire magazine by Phil Bronstein, former Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, provides granular details of the foray based on interviews with the Seal 6 commando who shot bin Laden dead, identifying him merely as the "shooter." Discussions during the planning stages looked at what would happen if they were surrounded by Pakistani troops. The original plan was to surrender and have Vice-President Joe Biden fly to Islamabad and negotiate their release.
But President Obama called it differently. "This is hearsay, but I understand Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military?" Bronstein paraphrases the shooter as saying. The commando also makes known his admiration for the President: That was the one time in my life I was thinking, I am f**king voting for this guy. I had a picture of him lying in bed at night, thinking, You're not f***king with my guys. Like, he's thinking about us.
The Seal6 team later gets word that the US would be scrambling jets on the border to back up the raiding party. The Shooter talks of writing tear-stained letters to his children to be delivered in case of their death because the chances of returning alive were not initially rated very high. "It was either death or a Pakistani prison, where we'd be raped for the rest of our lives," he says.
The actual confrontation itself resulting in his nailing bin Laden dead lasts only a few seconds, as the Shooter encounters him on the third floor of the Abbottabad mansion. "He had his hands on a woman's shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal...the SEALs had nightscopes, but it was coal-black for bin Laden and the other residents. He can hear but he can't see...He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting...He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don't know,' the Seal 6 shooter recalls.
Further: "He's got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he's famous for. And he's moving forward. I don't know if she's got a vest and she's being pushed to martyr them both. He's got a gun within reach. He's a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won't have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up]. In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap! The second time as he's going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place."
The raid is not without its moment of humor and pathos. The Shooter describes how going into the raid he had a full bladder and had to relieve himself into a bottle. "I forgot until later that when I shot bin Laden in the face, I had a bottle of piss in my pocket," he recounts. He also talks of listening later to phone calls between al-Qaida operatives trying to figure out who ratted on bin Laden. He quotes "funny terrorists" as saying, "I heard he did it to himself. He was locked up in that house with three wives."
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