‘Man Hunt’ serves as an accurate account of justice

Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, has a long and intimate history with Osama bin Laden.

In 1997, Bergen became the first Western journalist to secure an interview with bin Laden and was among the few allowed to tour the Abbottabad compound where the terrorist leader was killed during a U.S. Navy SEAL raid last May.

In his latest book,
"Man Hunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden – From 9/11 to Abbottabad," Bergen uses his in-depth grasp of world affairs, excellent sources and his own firsthand accounts to weave together a gripping narrative of the search for the world’s most dangerous man.

In the book’s foreword, Bergen outlines his experiences and meetings with bin Laden and describes the shock he felt when Bin Laden chose to use the interview as a forum for publicly declaring war on the Western world.

As Bergen explains, the book was compiled using a number of sources, including CIA operatives, top Washington officials, members of the Pakistani military and government, and information mined from the classified documents released to the press by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks.

In painstaking detail, Bergen traces bin Laden’s "career" as a jihadist leader, his movements before and after the attacks on 9/11, and the exhaustive collective effort that eventually led to his death.

Using documents recovered from his compound, Bergen is able to paint a portrait of the al-Qaida leader as a man and details his life during the nearly six years he spent living with members of his extended family in the vacation city of Abbottabad.

The book’s second half deals with the coordinated effort to find bin Laden and President Obama’s monumental decision to order the SEAL raid on his suspected compound.

Despite being surrounded by the nation’s leading military strategists and counter-terrorism experts, the decision to order the raid came down to President Obama alone. As Bergen’s interviews show, despite an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence and the "gut feelings" of those closest to the operation, no one was ever completely certain bin Laden was in fact hiding in the suspected compound. Famously, one of Obama’s advisers warned him the mission’s likelihood of success was statistically lower than the likelihood there had been of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Against the odds and the advice of those around him (including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden), Obama ordered the daring – and ultimately successful – nighttime raid.

Although Bergen was granted access to the highest levels of government during the writing of his book, he refuses to pull punches or grant leniency to his sources. In several chapters, Bergen frankly discusses "advanced interrogation" techniques used on suspected terrorists to gain information, the secret network of CIA-controlled prisons in Eastern Europe, the role of drone attacks in terrorist assassinations and expansive liberties taken by many of the counter-terrorism organizations while conducting surveillance and collecting information.

For anyone with an interest in the complicated jigsaw puzzle that is U.S. foreign policy, "Manhunt" will prove to be a gripping page-turner, with the excitement of a spy novel. For the rest of the public, "Manhunt" should serve as an account of justice and dealt to one of nations greatest foes.