The Daily Mail has an extensive article on the Navy Seals, "the silent warriors who took out Bin Laden."

The Seals website is here. They are deployed in 30 countries. Team Six, which in 2009 changed its name to the US Navy Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU, is the Seal team that conducted the raid.

The leader of the Naval Special Warfare is Rear Admiral Edward G. Winters III. Their mission statement is here.

Relying on information from "top level official sources", Pakistan's newspaper "The Nation" has a completely different version of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Conspiracy theorists will have a field day.

About 200 Pakistan Army men provided ground support, top level official sources told TheNation. During the operation, four helicopters of the Pakistan Army hovered over the fortress-like hideout....

....Initially, the US military personnel opened fire at the outer wall of Osama’s hideout, which was retaliated by the house inmates with heavy gunfire. After almost twenty minutes of cross-firing, the US forces directly targeted the house with sophisticated bombs, eventually killing Osama, his eight bodyguards, seven close aides and an unspecified number of family members including a young son, children and two wives.

Then there are those who don't believe Osama is dead.

On the other side, there's Wikileaks which says Pakistani security forces helped Osama evade detection and capture. [More...]

Don't miss Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight (ABC, midnight ET) on the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Transcript below: [More...]

The accounts by unnamed administration officials on the strike against the Osama bin Laden compound diverge on so many key points, I'm not spending any more time reading them right now. Everytime I start to write something up, another news story pops up with contrary information.

Whether it's Osama bin Laden, his courier, the bloody bedroom scene where he was killed, what happened to the other bodies, whether the helicopter crashed or was shot down, the blatantly false claim by Republicans that torturing detainees at secret overseas prisons led to the courier who led them to Osama's hideout, or other news of the day, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

From Ranker.com's list of top 50 funny Internet reactions to Osama bin Laden's death, this blooper someone posted on You Tube tops their list. A Fox News anchor mistakenly announcing President Obama was dead.

Also on the list, some funny graphics, including this and this; this Facebook replica, and another, in which someone named Victoria truly didn't know who Osama was (scroll through, she really didn't).

And this You Tube video creation of Donald Trump as Hitler, fuming and becoming unglued when he learns of Osama's death.

The list is bound to grow.

The headlines will probably appear en masse that Osama bin Laden was a coward who used his wife as a human shield. That's not what John Brennan said.

John Brennan said, "when she fought back and there was an opportunity to get bin laden, she was positioned in a way that indicated she was being used" as a shield. He stated he doesn't know whether she placed herself there, whether the son placed her there, or whether Osama put her there. He only knows she was used as a shield (by someone to protect Osama.)

Earlier in the conference he said a female was in the line of fire that reportedly was used as a human shield to shield Osama "from the incoming fire." So they were firing in. He said he did not know whether Osama got his hands on a weapon or whether he fired during the "firefight."[More...]

Jay Carney is conducting the White House briefing on the killing of Osama bin Laden. You can watch live here, it's just starting. John Brennan is up: (Live-blog)

If they had the ability to take Osama alive, they were prepared to do that. But they thought that was a remote possibility. There was a firefight and he was killed.

Killing Osama was killing the head of a snake. It gives us an opportunity to show the people of Pakistan that al Qaida is something in the past.[More...]

The principals convened mid-day. Obama joined them early afternoon before operation got underway. He left and rejoined the group when it started. They monitored the entire operation on a real-time basis. "The minutes passed like days." Obama was concerned about the security of our personnel. It was very tense. When we were informed that bin Laden was found, there was "a sigh of relief." Refuses to answer whether there was video, but says there were visuals they could track on an ongoing basis.

Last night on NBC, the correspondent with Brian Williams kept repeating we would be hearing more about JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) in connection with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Today, there is this description from Marc Ambinder at the National Journal. It makes warrantless wiretapping seem so last year.

McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular compound.

[More...]

Kevin Drum writes:

Tyler Cowen on the news that the intelligence that eventually led to the raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout may have been the result of torturing detainees at Guantanamo [. . .] This is one of the reasons that I think it's important not to put too much emphasis on practical arguments against torture. After all, if the reason you oppose torture is because torture doesn't work, then you'd better be prepared to change your mind if it turns out that torture does work. I'm not willing to do that.

Kevin is wrong. The practical argument is applicable as well as the legal and moral arguments. But first things first, Cowen simply is sort of making this up. The Haaretz column he is relying on says:

Via Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus:

it’s easy to overestimate the significance of Osama’s demise: Remember when we thought finding Saddam would turn the tide in Iraq?

What do you mean WE, Kemo Sabe? I remember Howard Dean being excoriated (by the likes of John Kerry too no less) for saying capturing Saddam was not a panacea for the Iraq Debacle.

Speaking for me only

Open Thread.

Justice, in the sense that a mass murderer has been killed, was done yesterday. No, there was no trial, etc, but Osama bin Laden never questioned his direction of the various acts of terrorism that killed thousands of people. He proudly proclaimed his involvement. His death was justice. Speaking for me only of course.

In terms of policy, does this weaken Al Qaida itself? Perhaps. It does not, in my view, weaken Islamic extremism, called Al Qaida or something else. Combating Islamic extremism remains a major foreign policy priority and foreign policy strategy and decision making requires a close look at impacts on Islamic extremism. The reaction in Pakistan is certainly worth following today.

On a lighter note, can you imagine a worse turn of events for Donald Trump? After becoming the butt of a national joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday night, the next night while he was hosting his reality show - a show that, in Trump's words, is "a really successful television show," the President of the United States was reporting to the Nation on a different reality - one that did not involve whether or not to fire Gary Busey. The joke that is Trump, which did not seem possible to be bigger, is now so. What can Trump possibly say now on his "really successful television show's" finale 3 weeks from now? How much more embarrassing can he become for NBC? The end of Trump "Mania" will now be a whimper. An embarrassing whimper.

Speaking for me only