Why they did what they did:
WIRED magazine on why Special Forces had to land in person and not nail with a unmanned drone aircraft or just bomb the site from a distance. The site is surrounded by all sorts of high-level Pakistani government / military sites, including their military academy, and drones or sloppy bombing could end up with worse problems than going in with a Special Ops team.
My take on this was they wanted Osama dead or alive, and they really didn’t worry about which result that they got.
Notes from the articles:
(New Yorker) It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army.
The initial circumstantial evidence suggests the opposite is more likely-that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury.
While I’m at it, the one weird note that was struck last night was the speed of the DNA analysis; when we did the DNA tests for the twins in 2004, it took about a month to get the results, not a few hours. This article addresses the probable protocols used in such an analysis, and says that you could do this in under 5 hours! Amazing.