Recommended: SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden

There have been a number of conflicting stories about the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. There were politicians who spun the story to make themselves look good. There were agencies who spun the story to inflate their part (if any) in the mission. There were sensationalist news stories geared mostly just to make news and increase ratings. There were stories by people with anti-war agendas to try and make it look inhuman. All in all it is hard to figure out what the real story was.

Chuck Pfarrer's book SEAL Target Geronimo (2011) is likely to be the closest to the real story that one is going to find. Pfarrer himself is a former assault element commander of SEAL Team Six, which means that he knows the system from the inside. He also had access to many of the key players in the mission, including some of the SEAL team members themselves.

The story is fascinating, though it doesn't reflect well on the politicians (who made much of the intelligence gathered from Bin Laden's hideout useless by promptly announcing that they had it), nor on agencies like the CIA or the FBI, who were in many cases more a hindrance than a help. The administration's politically-motivated need to crow about the mission meant that a number of Pakistanis who had helped were promptly identified, arrested, beaten and imprisoned for their efforts. And of course a number of people and agencies tried to prevent the book from being published, and are still trying to debunk it, because it contradicted the spin they were trying to put out.

One will come away from this story proud of American special forces, and disgusted with the self-serving politicians and Washington establishment. So what else is new?