Little gunfire during bin Laden raid

I speculated earlier today that there was probably not a lot of gunfire during the SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's Abottabad compound last Sunday.

There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to.

Just a few minutes ago, NBC Nightly News reported that there was only a little shooting inside the compound and almost all of it done by the SEALs. The only man who shot at the SEALs was a bodyguard, who promptly went to meet his 72 virgins.

The report also said that the SEALs encountered bin Laden's 19-year-old son on an interior stair and shot him dead. Osama himself peered down the stairs, saw the SEALs and ran back into his room, barely dodging a burst from a SEAL. The SEALs charged into the bedroom, where one shot bin Laden's wife in the leg. Another SEAL shot bin Laden once in the chest and once in the head. That was all the shooting. The rest of the 40 minutes the SEALs spent on the ground was taken up by piling as much material of intelligence value as possible into their grab bags.

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. That's why I earlier wrote that what the raid did was retrieve "enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so."