All the administration should have released was SEALs went in, bin Laden is dead, SEALs got out.

Everything else released on the Raid to End All Raids has done far more harm in it's release than good, from outing safe houses to outing operatives and letting out info about a stealth helicoptor and letting the Jihadis know we had a windfall of info on them. Think any of them are sleeping where they were on April 30?

He's never hear of op-sec, plausible deniability. He had to show off, couldn't resist letting everyone in the bar know he was carrying a gun so don't mess with him.

This is how it should have been done.

The Australian:

SEALs have been over there before, just quietly

ON a moonless night, US helicopters carrying a team of America's most elite forces crossed the Afghanistan border into Pakistan in pursuit of one of the world's most wanted terrorists.
Hovering over the compound, heavily armed US Navy SEALs scrambled expertly down ladders on to Pakistani soil as Pentagon officials in Virginia watched the events unfold by video link from a camera in an unmanned drone flying over the site.

But this did not happen last week, and the target was not Osama bin Laden.

It was 2006 and the man in the American's sights was bin Laden's

al-Qa'ida deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is still believed to be hiding within or close to Pakistan's tribal areas.

The little-known operation in Pakistan's remote Bajaur Agency near the Afghan border, ultimately unsuccessful, is rarely talked about and was never publicly claimed by the US administration.

But what it reveals is that last Monday's operation, which has sparked ferocious debate in Pakistan over national sovereignty, is far from the first time that elite USforces have mounted military operations on the ground in the nuclear-armed nation.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani was to address parliament last night to reiterate a message driven home last week by Pakistani military chiefs - that the country would not tolerate any further breaches of sovereignty by the US or any other nation.

He was also expected to announce a parliamentary inquiry into the intelligence services' failure to detect bin Laden, who lived for five years under their noses in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told senior Pakistani journalists last week that "certain red lines had been crossed" by the US military.

Several people present at that briefing have suggested the subtext of his message was that the US had crossed a line by carrying out an operation in an area where Pakistan's urban and increasingly anti-US population could bear witness to it.

The Navy SEAL operation in Bajaur Agency was first reported by The New York Times in 2008, which cited a former top CIA official as confirming the mission.

A former ISI station chief for Pakistan's Pashtun-dominated northwest and tribal areas from 2001 to 2003, Asad Munir, yesterday also confirmed the 2006 operation took place, and was different to the drone strike on a suspected Zawahiri compound in January of the same year that is said to have killed up to 25 civilians.

"They flew over in helicopters, people came out on ladders and searched the compound, found nothing, and flew back," Brigadier Munir told The Australian.

"It was known by the ISI, but not by the media, and never made it to the newspapers. It was a very low-profile operation, but I have no doubt that it occurred."

He said yet another operation occurred in 2008 just over the Afghan border in South Waziristan, in which three US special operations officers raided a madrassa suspected of being used as a base from which insurgents were firing on coalition forces.

Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former chief secretary of the northwest frontier province and Tribal Areas Commissioner, also confirmed the fact that last week's Navy SEALs raid was not the first on Pakistani soil.

"Americans have carried out small operations mostly on the border areas in the past, but they were hidden from public view," he said. "But this time they came deep inside Pakistan territory."

Authority for such sovereignty-breaching operations is believed to have been given in a 2004 classified US document called "Al-Qa'ida Network Exord", which streamlined the approval process for the US military to act outside officially declared war zones.

US President Barack Obama has conceded his administration took a giant risk by launching such a high-profile operation within an urban area when they were not certain bin Laden was even in the compound.