Bin Laden Killing: How The White House, Pentagon And CIA Botched The Storyline

From the very first moment the world learned that American forces had killed Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden, even the tiniest details from the momentous event have captivated the nation. Every single nugget of data has been the stuff of breaking news, handheld "alerts" and watercooler discussion, in a way the country has never previously witnessed.

No landmark event of the 20th century, from World Wars I and II to the Cuban missile crisis, from the moon landing to the fall of the Soviet Union – not even the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- have been as widely transmitted, reported on, written about, and talked about by as many people, across so many different platforms of communication, as the killing of bin Laden. Within days, it has become a singular event of the Information Age.

President Obama's decision to withhold the classified photographs and video associated with the mission has ironically served to deny this most modern of events one of the key ingredients present in virtually all other watershed news events in recent memory: pictures. We've had them from the Kennedy assassination and its Zapruder film to 9/11 and its camcorders. The Arab Spring comes via YouTube cell phone video, linked to from Twitter.

Indeed, in their sheer number of rate of disclosure, the details of the bin Laden mission have formed their own digital assault: They've poured forth virtually non-stop since the president finished speaking in the East Room of the White House, at 11:44 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday night, May 1, nine minutes after he had begun.

The riotous cacophony of claims and counter-claims has emanated from official podiums and anonymous sources, reputable reporters and unknown websites, everything, it seems, equipped with a screen, a speaker, or a mouth. Yet so grandly cinematic is our collective vision of the heroism displayed by the U.S. Navy SEALs and intelligence operatives who pulled off this astonishing mission that we have hung on every word of their exploits. As TIME magazine's Michael Crowley tweeted on Tuesday: "Impossible to focus today: every 10 minutes some new fact comes along that would be the most interesting thing I've heard in a typical week."

The true irony is: From the first moments, a good number of the details about bin Laden's killing, on points large and small, have been wrong.

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