
The Raid That Killed Bin Laden
On May 1, 2011, US special forces flew into Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden inside a walled compound less than a mile from the country's military academy. This film draws on the leaked findings of the Abbottabad Commission, the Pakistani government body tasked with reconstructing exactly what happened that night and how bin Laden had lived undetected in a garrison town for years. It examines the intelligence failures on both the American and Pakistani sides, the diplomatic fallout from a unilateral raid conducted without Islamabad's knowledge, and the unanswered questions about who in Pakistan's security establishment knew what. Officials, analysts, and commission testimony are used to piece together the timeline, from the helicopter approach to the firefight inside the compound. The film treats the raid less as a triumphant mission and more as a case study in mutual suspicion between two governments that called themselves allies.