According to No Easy Day, the new book by Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette (writing under the pseudonym "Mark Owen"), Osama Bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot — and many of the initial accounts of the raid that killed him were wrong.

According to the AP, which got its hands on a copy of the book:

Bin Laden apparently was hit in the head when he looked out of his bedroom door into the top-floor hallway of his compound as SEALs rushed up a narrow stairwell in his direction [...] Bissonnette says he was directly behind a "point man" going up the stairs. "Less than five steps" from top of the stairs, he heard "suppressed" gunfire: "BOP. BOP." The point man had seen a "man peeking out of the door" on the right side of the hallway.

The author writes that bin Laden ducked back into his bedroom and the SEALs followed, only to find the terrorist crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood with a hole visible on the right side of his head and two women wailing over his body.

Bissonnette says the point man pulled the two women out of the way and shoved them into a corner and he and the other SEALs trained their guns' laser sites on bin Laden's still-twitching body, shooting him several times until he lay motionless. The SEALs later found two weapons stored by the doorway, untouched, the author said.

While this contradicts the very first few accounts of the raid, it's more or less in line with what Leon Panetta told Jim Lehrer last year: that bin Laden was unarmed, and that the SEALs were responding to "threatening moves."

But, ha, who wants to focus on extrajudicial murder and possible violations of international law when there's hilarious White House gossip? From the Huffington Post:

Though he praises the president for green-lighting the risky assault, Owen says the SEALS joked that Obama would take credit for their success. On his second night in Afghanistan waiting for final orders, sitting around a fire pit and joking about which Hollywood actors would play them in the bin Laden movie, one SEAL joked, "And we'll get Obama reelected for sure. I can see him now, talking about how he killed bin Laden," according to Owen.

[...]

After listening to Obama's speech and enduring Biden's "lame jokes that no one got (He seemed like a nice guy, but he reminded me of someone's drunken uncle at Christmas dinner)" the president invited the team to return to his residence later for a beer.

But Owen writes a few weeks later: "We never got the call to have a beer at the White House." Joking with a fellow SEAL, "Hey, did you ever hear anything about that beer?" Walt cracks: " You believed that shit. I bet you voted for change too, sucker."

Ha ha, Obama sucks.

[WaPo, HuffPo, images via AP]