[ajays]

> Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation.

That's because the helicopter crash threw the old plans out the window. Once there's physical evidence of the Americans' raid, you've got to get ahead of the story. Obama simply had no choice.

[antimagic]

Personally, I feel like this whole question is just one of many instances of information in the article that I find highly dubious.

This is Osama bin Laden. The US had been hunting him for years. There was no way that the president wasn't going to announce his death from the rooftops, and I have a hard time believing that any senior member of special ops thought otherwise. At those levels even the military officers are canny political operatives, they don't get their stars otherwise, and they would have known that this raid was going to be publicised.

So yeah, the fact that the White House was talking about this mission mere hours after its completion is a total non-surprise, and it would have been obvious to anyone involved that this would be the case, helicopter crash or not.

[angersock]

If they can't manage to deflect questions about one little misplaced helicopter, I rather think our intelligence apparatus is losing its touch.