A full debriefing takes time. In a stress filled situation everyone has a different idea of what happened. Just ask your colleagues to list what order people came to work this morning and you'll see 'just say what happened' can't be done.
The USA condemns other nations for displaying dead american servicemen; how could it then display OBLs?
And it would dispel no conspiracy theories. Only last week we were told the production of a long form of birth certificate would settle the birther issue; as soon as it was produced it was sudddenly worthless.
Besides if OBL was alive there'd be a video of him reading last nights news items out by now. You think Al Qaeda wouldn't take a chance to totally discredit the USA?
qjs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...n-compound.html

CIA Director Panetta now says the live video feed failed for the entirety of the compound invasion.

Fortunately the mission proceeded more smoothly than the WH pr campaign.

Once again forum members are hitting the roof over imaginary wrongs:

>So you capture the mastermind of evil itself , and you don't >interrogate him?

No one but yourself is saying this happened. Please provide details of the white house briefing where it was said OBL was captured.

>Fortunately the mission proceeded more smoothly than the WH pr campaign.

There is no WH pr campaign. Which bit of 'A full debriefing takes time' don't you understand?
qjs

There's always a WH pr campaign, no matter the POTUS.

If you don't understand that, you know very little about American politics.

>There's always a WH pr campaign, no matter the POTUS.

You are right. I phrased that badly. What I meant is that we can expect the facts to come out gradually. Something said initially later being denied, is evidence that debriefs take time; not them being unable to get their facts right.
qjs

I was going to stay out of this discussion, but must respectively disagree with you on your position. While detailed debriefing may reveal additional “facts” or points of view, the overall sense of the mission, with the vast majority of the “facts” well known by those in the position of interacting with the media and public. Whenever there is major shifting of the “facts” one needs to look at the information being released with a healthy degree of skepticism. Many of us here have been involved with military, law enforcement or other disaster response operations to know that what actually happened is often at odds with the official line and has nothing to do with the process of debriefing.

While there may be some variations due to the fog of war, the individuals involved in this operation were well trained professionals who are quite capable of providing detailed objective reports. Additionally, I can almost guarantee that much if not all of the operation was video recorded and those videos have been reviewed dozens of times for comparison with verbal and written reports.

Just my 2 cents-
Pete

>Many of us here have been involved with military, law enforcement >or other disaster response operations to know that what actually >happened is often at odds with the official line and has nothing >to do with the process of debriefing.

I agree. But in this case the facts that keep being released are to the disadvantage of the administration. If it was all lies they'd have stuck with the first version.
qjs

Respectfully disagree. Just trying to understand the logic. In my (uninformed) opinion, if you have the opportunity to capture the world's greatest intelligence asset, you do everything possible to find out what he knows. Lets not forget, he was largely responsible for our foreign/domestic policy for the last 10 years. And you're not going to find out what he knows? That seems either really stupid or completely incompetent.

Signed,
The professional armchair quarterback

It's sad to think, but I bet they consider him a martyr.

After all this noise, I hope no one sees him walking the street somewhere.

Sue