Col North identifies the biggest blunder of Obama in the whole operation: immediately announcing it.
It was absolutely stupid. Didn’t it occur to Obama, Hillary or Panetta that the immediate announcement might compromise the usefulness of gathered intelligence from the site?
On its own, it would have taken at least 36-72 hours before the Pakistani authorities would have figured out exactly what happened and word leaked out to other members of the al Qaeda network that bin Laden had been killed and his computers, etc. taken. Maybe even longer, depending on bin Laden’s regular communication methods.
Waiting even just a week to announce it might have given our intelligence agencies a fighting chance to roll up other parts of the network who might not yet have gotten the word.
It is almost as if they wanted to quickly alert al Qaeda to what happened. Are they really that stupid? Or were they so eager to credit Obama (”I, me, I, I, me”) as the great Osama-killer that they just didn’t care that they were leaving things on the table?
In which case, his immediate announcement serves well in, as you point out, alerting the rest of the team while making obsolete any intel gleaned from the mission.
This seems to fit in with many things he's done, such as tie our soldiers' hands with ROE that benefit the enemy and the like. imo
Maybe Obama really did want to alert them.
Remember his face in that situation-room photo? Absolutely grim-faced, and it looked to me like he did NOT want this to be happening, as if he were more concerned about his brother-in-faith Osama Bin Laden and the welfare of the Umma.
Look at it again. Does his face look like he's the concerned captain-in-chief of our military? Or an ideologue getting bad news about a brother-in-arms? He looks like he's watching Rodney King reruns, actually.