Manhunt, Bergen - B+

                                         This fast paced book is the summary of the well-known story of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Peter Bergen is the CNN correspondent famous for being the producer of a 1997 interview wherein bin Laden declared holy war on America. The matters that jump out in this telling are the President's decisiveness, the extraordinary technologies that our security forces have at their fingertips and the difficulty of finding this needle in a haystack. Bergen depicts Obama as cooly assessing the disparate recommendations before him. Biden and Sec. Gates were opposed to making the move. Sec's. Clinton and Panetta were in favor, even though the CIA analysts weren't certain bin Laden was there and the military plans were not a sure thing.  The technologies we have developed made it possible for Washington to watch the raid on a live feed from a  drone circling above.  Those same technologies had reduced bin Laden to living off the grid and pacing a small area of his compound hidden by a tarp. The search is recounted here, but is certainly well-told in the movie  'Zero Dark Thirty'.  Bergen points out bin Laden thought 9/11 would cause the US to cower, but instead we came out with guns blazing and pretty much buried not just him, but his ideologies, organization, dreams, and people.  The author barely touches on the costs in terms of dollars, death, and anguish that the US has undergone in the pursuit of revenge for 9/11.