But bin Laden didn't appear to have been given a chance to surrender himself to the SEALs.

"To be frank, I don't think he had a lot of time to say anything," CIA Director Leon Panetta said in an interview airing on PBS NewsHour.

U.S. officials have described a chaotic scene inside the sprawling compound as the SEALs fought running gun battles with militants. When commandos reached the room were bin Laden had been sleeping, they made a quick decision to kill him.

"It was a firefight going up that compound. By the time they got to the third floor and found bin Laden, I think this was all split-second action on the part of the SEALs," Panetta said in the PBS interview.

The administration had both practical and moral reasons for wanting the al-Qaida leader dead. Few individuals have been responsible for the deaths of more American civilians than bin Laden, who had orchestrated the September 11 attacks as well as a variety of smaller deadly strikes against American targets. For many at the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency who had spent nearly a decade hunting bin Laden, killing the militant was a necessary and justified act of vengeance.

Capturing bin Laden alive would have also presented the administration with an array of nettlesome legal and political challenges. The White House would have needed to decide where to imprison him, how harshly to interrogate him about potential new attacks, and how - and when - to put him on trial for the killings of the thousands of Americans who died at his direction.

A bin Laden trial, even before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, would have attracted enormous media attention, potentially giving the terror mastermind a high-profile platform for spreading his extremist views, and also could have inspired more terrorist attacks. Given the political firestorm that erupted over Attorney General Eric Holder's aborted plan to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in New York City, the administration was also wary of the congressional scrutiny that would have surrounded every decision it made about bin Laden's legal fate.

The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration's counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.

In the fall of 2009, for instance, JSOC and the CIA located one of the administration's most-wanted men, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the leader of the al-Qaida affiliate in East Africa, as he drove though Somalia. Nabhan was suspected of orchestrating a string of deadly attacks in Kenya in 2002 as well as being involved in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks that left 250 dead. Military commanders told Obama administration officials that commandos could try to take Nabhan alive or kill him from the air. The White House told JSOC they wanted Nabhan dead. A short time later, U.S. helicopters carrying SEAL commandos fired missiles into Nabhan's car, killing him instantly.