On Why Bin Laden Killed Not Captured

As top American officials and a Navy SEAL who was on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden grapple over whether the al Qaeda leader "resisted" before he was shot, the SEAL said in a recent interview that in the heat of battle, the men on the ground weren't going to take any chances with their target. In a firsthand account of the May 2011 raid, written under the pseudonym Mark Owen, the Navy SEAL Team Six member who was right behind the "point man" who first shot Osama bin Laden said that before they took off for bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the commandos were told that it was not a kill-only mission. "A lawyer from either the Department of Defense or the White House made it clear that this wasn't an assassination," Owen write "We were less than five steps from getting to the top [of the stairs] when I heard suppressed shots," Owen writes. "BOP. BOP. The point man had seen a man peeking out of the door on the right side of the hallway about ten feet in front of him. I couldn't tell from my position if the rounds hit the target or not. The man disappeared into the dark room." It wasn't until other members of the team entered the room that they realized the man had been hit in the head and then, after shooting him in the chest a few more times until he stopped twitching, they realized it was bin Laden, the book says. America's most wanted man was unarmed and though there was a rifle and a handgun in a room nearby, neither had a bullet loaded in the chamber. "He hadn't even p s in his book, "No Easy Day." "'If he is naked with his hands up, you're not going to engage him,' he told us. 'I am not going to tell you how to do your job. What we're saying is if he does not pose a threat, you will detain him.'" But later in the book, Owen writes that bin Laden was shot the second he poked his head out of a door frame, apparently before he had a chance to resist or present a visible threat. At the time, Owen said he didn't know who his teammate's bullets had hit, if anyone.