Over three years after the death of Osama bin Laden, the former Navy Seal who shot the al-Qaida leader has come forward to identify himself.
Thursday, Nov. 11, the former team leader for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, Robert O’Neill, publicly revealed that he shot and killed the infamous terrorist. In a series of exclusive interviews with Fox News, O’Neill discussed the harrowing details of the assassination, the final moments of the orchestrator of the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is the first time O’Neill has given his name in public, as he wanted to be the first to break the news to the American people. However, he previously shared about his experience killing bin Laden under the protection of anonymity. Last year, Esquire published an extensive interview with O’Neill, who was identified as simply “The Shooter.”
O’Neill had previously donated the shirt he was wearing during the mission to the 9/11 Memorial Museum and allowed media to document his time there for the sake of history. However, he strongly emphasized that footage was not to be published unless he decided to go public about bin Laden.
When O’Neill was filmed touring the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the media surprised him with a gathering of families who had lost loved ones that fateful day of September. His words brought heavy emotions, and he was thanked by many tearful people.
Perhaps it is a human instinct to cut into bite-size pieces those things we don’t understand. After all, an issue is more manageable if viewed as one concrete face and not an ambiguous amalgamation of people. As one of the key leaders of al-Qaida, bin Laden was a symbol of a major threat to national security. Although not alone in his extremist agenda, his name has long represented for Americans the fear and threat of jihadists.
In the interview with Fox, O’Neill explains that he revealed himself hoping to bring peace and closure to several families whose relatives had died in the 9/11 attacks. While the al-Qaida leader represented the atrocities of the Iraq war, O’Neill was the face of American triumph — the hero who, after years of U.S. troops fighting in the Middle East, fired the two bullets that decisively brought the world’s best-known terrorist organization to its knees.
A statement released Oct. 31 by the United States Special Warfare Command did not mention O’Neill’s name specifically, but the group made clear its preemptive disapproval of his upcoming public statements.
“Any real credit to be rendered is about the incredible focus, commitment and teamwork of this diverse network and the years of hard work undertaken with little individual public credit,” the statement read. “It is the nature of our profession.”
Time Magazine writer Mark Thompson said that O’Neill’s words were “tainted with a sense of gloating.”
“It is the selfless nature of American troops that makes their work honorable,” Thompson wrote.
While O’Neill’s wish to bring closure to families of fallen soldiers and 9/11 victims is admirable, I wonder if the abundance of explicit imagery regarding bin Laden’s death is necessary. Fox News has dedicated itself to a series of exclusive content picking apart the details of the mission, all the way down to how long it took bin Laden to lose consciousness and fall to the floor after O’Neill shot him in the face.
Media sites have long received criticism for honing in too much on killers in nationally newsworthy cases, unintentionally glorifying the individual. This is not to compare O’Neill to a criminal; however, the obsession over one killer and the last breaths of the deceased poses some disturbing implications. There exists a disturbing juxtaposition between the glorification and adoration ascribed to O’Neill and the rhetoric associated with bin Laden reducing him to a mere target, an animal.
Closure for affected families is important, but matters concerning the taking of another human’s life must be handled with dignity, delicacy and most importantly, humility. If Americans glorify death in any circumstance, then we are no better than the injustices we claim to fight.