Video to watch: Inside the Situation Room and Killing Bin Laden
A year after Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, President Barack Obama and his national security advisors recounted the meticulous planning and intense meetings held before the president made his final decision to go forward with the mission against bin Laden. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.
Video Courtesy: NBCNews.com
In the universe of historic photographs, few are more iconic this this image of key White House policymakers watching and waiting for confirmation that SEAL Team Six had succeeded in capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.
Although this photo is known as the “Situation Room” picture, White House photographer Pete Souza actually took it squeezed into a corner of the small adjacent conference room into which President Barack Obama had stepped in order to watch the video feed in real time.
A plate of sandwiches and other snacks, fetched earlier in the day from Costco by a White House staffer, was abandoned in the main Situation Room.
The result: a moment of almost tangible tension and anxiety among the silent group of senior leaders. We don’t see CIA Director Leon Panetta, who brought the first news of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound eight months earlier, only days before the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Nor do we see Vice Admiral William McRaven, the head of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), a special ops veteran who had commanded or participated in more than a thousand similarly hazardous ventures.
He was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, supervising the SEAL team’s mission from there. Still, the image captures a defining moment in history, offering a rare glimpse into who the key White House players were—and what they were thinking—as they waited to hear the words “Geronimo (bin Laden’s code name) EKIA (enemy killed in action).
Source-https://www.history.com/
