The highly anticipated first-hand account of the Osama bin Laden raid—"No Easy Day," authored by ex-SEAL Team Six member Mark Owen—is set to debut in bookstores next week and interesting details from the book are beginning to leak out.
Wired reports on one passage relating the Team’s correct prediction that the Obama reelection campaign would exploit a successful mission for political gain:
In the excerpts they present, Owen praises President Obama for giving the green light to attack bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. But even before the mission began, Owen and his fellow SEALs knew that the raid would be played up by the White House for political purposes.
‘We’ll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden,’ one SEAL said, according to Owen.
Owen adds: ‘We all knew the deal. We were tools in the toolbox, and when things go well they promote it. They inflate their roles. But we should have done it. It was the right call to make. Regardless of the politics that would come along with it, the end result was what we all wanted.’
(*EDITOR’S NOTE: The excerpt from Wired uses the alleged real name of the book’s author in its original write-up. The book, however, is written under the pseudonym Mark Owen. Out of respect for the hero, the Free Beacon replaced his alleged real name with his pseudonym in the quoted text.)