“I agree with some others on this thread that we’ve known about this compound for quite some time. I’m sure the president would have liked to put this attack off for the next 17 months or so, but something changed to force his hand at this particular moment. Otherwise, I just can’t see him releasing the birth certificate the same week as this mission.”
I don’t think that Obama timed the operation based on political events. I think that the opposite is true: Obama released the birth certificate last week so that the issue would not be a distraction when Osama got taken out. Could you imagine had Obama not released the long-form birth certificate last week and they would have announced that the president would be speaking to the nation at 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening? There would have been two or three hours of speculation about Obama announcing that he was born in Kenya (or Canada), or that he was resigning, or that his real father was Malcolm X, you name it. And when he announced that we had killed Osama, it would be almost anti-climactic, and you’d have half the population ignoring what the President was saying because he didn’t have the decency of taking five minutes of his time to request a birth certificate. So Obama was smart to release the birth certificate last week; if he was smarter, he would have released it 3 years ago.
I think this is a sage observation.
Also, once they made the decision to not bomb the compound and to launch an air assault instead, I think it's probably the lunar cycles that mattered more than anything. This weekend happened to be the new moon - the darkest period of nighttime in the lunar cycle.