Politico has gotten ahold of the new e-book by ABC News with the title: “TARGET: Bin Laden – The Death and Life of Public Enemy Number One.” Finally, all of the options and worries and scenarios involved with this dangerous, risky mission are coming to the forefront.
According to Mike Allen of Politico, here are some of the highlights:
* Bin Laden’s code name: Cakebread … code name for his Abbottabad compound,  AC-1 … a “fight-your-way-out” scenario, if everything went wrong … CIA Director Leon Panetta’s last call to Special Forces: “Go in and find bin Laden, and if he’s not there, get the hell out.”
* ABC’s Jake Tapper writes that on March 29, President Obama called his team together … to walk through the two options … The president had a pointed question at this meeting: If they proceeded with the B-2 (bombing) option, would the U.S. be able to find bin Laden’s body in the rubble? … No, he was told. The attack would reduce the whole compound to rocks. There would be the remote possibility that the U.S. could send someone to the compound to kick through the rubble and look for traces of flesh or hair, but with twenty-two people at the compound the U.S. would have no real idea of what they were getting, and they certainly would not have a body to produce. This is a problem, the president thought: we need to be able to know we definitely got the guy. We need to be able to exploit potential information in the compound. And we need to try to minimize collateral damage since this is a residential neighborhood. … How much time was needed to get the surgical strike going? How quickly could the team move? What would the Special Forces soldiers do if the compound has a safe room? What if bin Laden isn’t there? How would you get bin Laden out? … We really ought to think harder about the helicopter option, as risky as it is, the president finally said. The B-2 option had been removed from the table.” 
* On Sunday, May 1, shortly after 3 p.m., the president and his team huddled in the Situation Room. Vice President Joe Biden twisted his rosary ring. On the screen in front of them they watched night-vision images from a drone, while Panetta, at CIA headquarters, was in a corner of the screen narrating what was happening. Audio reports came in… The raid started out poorly. One of the stealth Black Hawks crashed, luckily with no serious injuries. It was a serious white-knuckle moment, but the pilot was a pro and everyone was OK. The rappelling was scrapped. Then someone started firing at the SEALs from the compound. The SEALs fired back. Flashes and flares filled the screen. There was no audio … only Panetta explaining what they were watching. The SEALs were getting off the choppers. The SEALs were returning fire. One of the SEALs had a specially trained dog that could attack on command, a Belgian Malinois. The SEALs were exploding walls. Some of the SEALs were entering one house where one courier lived, others were entering the bigger house, where bin Laden might be.

(Obviously the famous photo from the situation room, with the president Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others looking extraordinarily tense, was taken at roughly this point in the chronology.)
* When the SEALs entered the buildings, there were around twenty-to-twenty-five minutes that passed when the screen in (the Situation Room) showed nothing happening. … Finally came the good news: ‘Geronimo-E-KIA,’ the president was told. Bin Laden, the ‘E’ – enemy — had been ‘KIA,’ killed in action. … Pakistani’s military scrambled fighter jets looking for the helicopters, trying to figure out who was in their country and why. After all, its relations with neighboring India are tense and Pakistan routinely is on high alert. … The SEALS detonated the crashed Black Hawk and took off in the one surviving stealth Black Hawk. The two Chinooks and the SEALs in the Black Hawk motored back to Jalalabad. The operation on the ground lasted only forty minutes, but no one breathed easy until the troops were all back on the Afghanistan side of the border, around 5:45 p.m. ET. They carried with them bin Laden’s corpse, and a trove of computers and other data storage devices from his house. They left behind the crashed chopper, which they had detonated. Once they were safe, then came the other dilemma. How sure were they that they had got their man? The SEALs were certain that it was Osama bin Laden, and women who lived at the compound had identified him. Pictures from the scene indicated it was him. The corpse was over six feet tall, the president was told, matching bin Laden’s reputed height of six-foot-four. Back at Jalalabad, one of the SEALs who stood at six feet lay down next to the body. The corpse was well over six feet tall.