Entertainment

Killing Bin Laden never gets tired

GOT HIM: Unidentified CIA analyst puts the pieces of the al Qaeda network together on a wall at the agnecy’s Langley, Va., headquarters. (
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GOT HIM: Unidentified CIA analyst puts the pieces of the al Qaeda network together on a wall at the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters. (
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Prediction: By this time next year, everyone from the gardener to the cleaning lady at the bin Laden compound will have a movie and book deal telling their side of the story.

That said, tomorrow night’s documentary “Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for bin Laden” on HBO is still very worth watching because it’s told from the perspective of the actual people who brought him down.

That means the female CIA analysts behind the scenes and the male spies who worked the streets.

Unlike what you may have heard about this terrific documentary by Greg Barker, about how torture is condoned, it’s just not true.

Yes, super spies like Jose Rodriguez, former chief of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, and swashbuckling Marty Martin (whom you’d swear is straight out of Nelson DeMille’s novel “The Panther”) do condone water boarding.

But FBI agent Ali Soufan, on the other hand, abhors it, saying that most information was gleaned before water boarding.

In fact, he says “[I told them] we shouldn’t be part of this and I don’t want to be part of this.”

What the film does concentrate on, however, is how the monster was tracked and how the CIA was blamed by members of Congress right after 9/11 for failing in their jobs when, in truth, dozens and dozens of reports were channeled to the White House up until August 2001 warning of the bin Laden threat.

And even reporter Peter Bergen who, with Peter Arnett, interviewed bin Laden for CNN in 1997, shows clips of bin Laden telling the reporters that he’d invade the US.

All was ignored. Or, as Bergen points out, it was as if the Japanese had made a newsreel saying they’d attack Pearl Harbor and nobody paid attention.

CIA agents also explain how nearly impossible the task was to put a time, place and method to his intent.

The biggest CIA mistakes were made in situations like the disaster at the base in Khost with a meeting set with a handsome, young medical doctor/radical blogger, Human al-Balawi.

The agents thought they’d “recruited” al-Balawi and therefore allowed him on the base without being checked for weapons to meet with 14 CIA agents.

He got out of his car at the first meeting, said, “God is great,” and blew everyone up including the agent who arranged the meeting, head analyst Jennifer Mathews.

”Manhunt” is far superior to Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning film “Zero Dark Thirty” for at least one reason: The female agents in the documentary — like Nada Bakos, who was charged with tracking al-Zarqawi, and upon whom much of Jessica Chastain’s CIA agent, Maya, was based — are totally unlike her in so many ways. And they are much more passionate and interesting.

You’ll also love the irreverent, hilariously dangerous Martin, who don’t take no crap from nobody.

Don’t miss it.