I’m not surprised by how much paranoid conspiracy claptrap exists around the Osama bin Laden mission. It has become all too routine for “false flag” allegations to wave madly after such events, and that is in great part due to the very act of truth-telling about them. Reports delivered 10,000 miles from the scene will always conflict. Impressions gathered remotely will invariably prove wrong in detail.

If the White House wanted to misinform us, they would have had their story straight from the beginning: changing details indicate they are trying to discern a truth that isn’t clear through the smoke.

The term for this phenomenon is “fog of war,” but one needn’t engage in combat to understand it. In everyday situations, two witnesses can report completely different impressions of an event seen from their diverging viewpoints. Police officers deal with this problem every day; so do reporters. Eyewitnesses can even disagree with themselves. Take Karoli, an outstanding blogger who made an error identifying the initial aggressor during an altercation outside a town hall — despite having a camera in her hands at the time:

The man in the khaki shirt is Bill Rice, the man whose pinky finger was bitten off. The man in the yellow shirt was misidentified by me as the puncher in my initial post. (Ed: link) My face-to-face interview yesterday with a Ventura County Sheriff’s department detective made it clear that I was mistaken about who had hit whom. (Emphasis mine)

That was just a brief fistfight on an otherwise orderly street. Battle, on the other hand, is chaos on a broad scale, and armies are chiefly in the business of managing that chaos. Armies have always attempted to handle the problem of war fog through training and technology, but not always with success. False reporting — due to confusion, misunderstanding, or garbled transmission — has always been a given.

False reporting became an even bigger problem in the age of industrialized warfare. Generals of the First World War had to camp far enough behind the lines to receive wire communications from the largest battlefield ever seen in human history — a phenomenon that birthed the widespread, yet incorrect, impression that generals of WWI led from behind. In fact, “the Great War” was the deadliest conflict ever for generals, who often found themselves on those lethal front lines trying to resolve sketchy, contradictory reports.

The technology that allows a president to watch an operation unfold in real-time a world away doesn’t necessarily clarify the situation for him. A standard drone cannot fly inside a building. Even if every last member of a SEAL team wore a helmet-cam, the imagery may not include the most important sights — or even stay still long enough to get a good look at them. The jiggling, handheld cameras in many YouTube videos are a fair approximation — with the effect multiplied under the physical duress of a house-clearing operation. A bank of telemetry feeds on small screens would be more confusing than helpful.

Even good video would only be useful for analysis later, perhaps during the After Action Review, or AAR. During my service, I participated in countless AARs to dissect all manner of operations: if the platoon held a training, we had an AAR; if we held an exercise, we had an AAR; if we cleaned the barracks toilets, we had an AAR.

Rest assured that SEAL Team 6 held an AAR upon their return to base — but not while they were combing Osama’s house for intelligence, destroying the downed Blackhawk, leaving the scene before Pakistani authorities could show up, and getting out of that country. America was told that Osama was dead before the AAR was even conducted.

But even an AAR isn’t focused on the nuanced details of an operation. Only in a full debriefing (.PDF) are contradictory impressions brought to resolution: was that woman really being used as a human shield, or was she trying to shield her husband? So there was a gun; was Osama holding that gun, or was he near it? This takes time, which is why whole days can pass before details get clarified.

Nothing about this involves intent to deceive. Changing reports are a routine element of military operations; deception, on the other hand, is characterized by a story that begins “straight” while the deceiver tries to make facts fit the story. For instance, Pat Tillman’s fellow soldiers burned his uniform and body armor to cover up his death by friendly fire, and falsified accounts were used to award him posthumous medals.

Deceptions eventually crumble under examination, however, and even with those malfeasances the Army review process worked out the truth in the Tillman case:

That information was slow to make it back to the United States, the report said, and Army officials here were unaware that his death on April 22, 2004, was fratricide when they notified the family that Tillman had been shot. Over the next 10 days, however, top-ranking Army officials — including the theater commander, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid — were told of the reports that Tillman had been killed by his own men, the investigation said. But the Army waited until a formal investigation was finished before telling the family — which was weeks after a nationally televised memorial service that honored Tillman on May 3, 2004. (Emphasis mine)

It’s important to understand that the White House has led the examination of events in Abbottabad, updating its account of the operation in the process. No one has been leaning on them to explain things. No one had to. The White House was quite eager to know what has happened, and has learned more as the review process unfolded. That’s exactly what one would expect.

But it doesn’t matter to the paranoid set. They want to believe, or rather disbelieve, and that makes all the difference. In the tinfoil-hat narrative, Osama has been dead since 1999 and his supposed death at the hands of American Special Forces is just another chapter in the murky, evil master plan of global conquest under false flags. All new evidence is proof of theory, even when it isn’t. That’s what their storytellers say, and it’s the story they prefer. The most enduring kind of deception is self-deception, for it is self-motivated.