The New Yorker: Getting bin Laden

Can you imagine being the guy lying down next to bin Laden's dead body so they could guesstimate his height?

 

And he was the only guy close to 6 foot. The team must have been all shrimps.

 

How bout the fact that bin Laden's actual nickname wasn't Geronimo.... it was "Crankshaft".

[Insert pornography / crankshaft jokes here]

How raunchy is that.

 

I want to know why the White House ordered sandwiches from Costco. The West Wing kitchen couldn't handle it?

 

What effect, if any, did the solid walls of the compound have on the crash, considering they trained on a simulation that had a chain link fence?

If there was an effect, is that something the pilot could have/should have foreseen?

 

I wondered that also. What a great little nugget of information.

 

Helluva point here. I always thought one of the cool little nuances of being the president is the ability to get what I wanted, when I wanted. And I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the White House can get a finer deli meat selection than Costco.

 

Story mentioned that - something to do with the air flow difference of enclosed area.

Look forward to Three Bags incite on this one.

 

I wonder who paid the membership fee.

 

Author will be doing an online chat at 3 p.m. EST:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2011/08/osama-bin-laden-raid-nicholas-schmidle.html

 

So I guess this is one way to become a journalist, huh? Just up and do it.

From Amazon.com's Booklist review of Schmidle's book on Pakistan:

"In 2006, wanting to become a journalist but lacking any journalistic experience, Schmidle decided he would go to Iran, but political upheaval there nixed that plan, so he chose Pakistan instead. After hurriedly gathering background, he spent two years in the country, exploring its past and present, living among its people, writing about them."

 

My guess is they didn't want anyone to know who/how many top brass would be in on a Sunday afternoon, lest there be a leak.