From the New York Times: How Bin Laden was found, killed

Hey, the New York Times has a great piece about the intelliegence used to find Usama bin Laden.

After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August.

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden's whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

More..

For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden's most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier's pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

And that's the takeway--which I mentioned this morning. Gitmo, which President Obama vowed to close, did its job. If a law-enforcement approach had been used, rather than a military one, would UBL still be a free man?

But I'm thrilled the president gave the go-ahead to kill the beast.

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