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IMO opinion they were watching multiple live video feeds from tiny cameras carried by the soldiers. If they were not then our intelligence community is incompetent.

We have very large NRO satellites in geosynchronous orbit that can easily pick up the signals from tiny cameras anywhere on the earth. These NRO sats have antennas of about 350' diameter. That's comparable to the Green Bank radio telescope.

The reason such a large dish can be lifted to orbit is because it can be very lightly built as it does not need to contend with gravity or wind. It could be unfolded from a relatively small package and open much like an giant umbrella. It probably has an active surface but could operate well even without one. The Green Bank dish has an active surface because it deforms due to gravity and must be adjusted to work at all above 3.5GHz or so.

The Greenbank dish

With such incredible equipment in orbit all sorts of tiny cameras can be deployed, placing them in common ordinary looking objects would be a good use of the capability. Think rocks that can see, all that's needed is a tiny pinhole opening for the cmos sensor and a sub milliwatt rf transmitter.

I'm a ham radio geek, I'd love to play with these expensive toys! :-) This is all conjecture on my part but I see little possibility that I am wrong here. The NRO sats are common knowledge and it's easy to calculate what the abilities would be with a dish that size from a mere 23,000 miles out looking down on the planet.

Here is an excerpt from a net page on the site "The Daily Caller" titled "Correcting the ‘fairy tale’: A SEAL’s account of how Osama bin Laden really died". It's a good read......

Pfarrer suggests that much of the misinformation was likely born out of operational ignorance, even among those sitting in the White House.

“One of the things that happened was that there were only a handful of people who know about this mission,” he said. “On the civilian side, there were only a handful of people in the situation room who were watching the drone feed. They were looking at the roof of a building taken from a rotating aircraft at 35,000 feet.”

“None of those guys, not a single one of them, had a background in special operations, with the exception of General Webb who was sitting there running a laptop,” Pfarrer went on. “No one knew or could even imagine what was going on inside the building. They didn’t know.”

“There was an alternative feed going to CIA headquarters where Leon Panetta sat there with the communications brevity codes [a guide sheet for the mission's radio lingo] in his lap and a SEAL off-screen by his side to be able to tell him what was going on,” he said. “But these guys, none of them, really knew what they were looking at.”

http://news.yahoo.com/correcting-fairy-tale-seal-account-osama-bin-laden-054233289.html