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The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.

Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders, he was able to indulge in his hobbies... and he was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes to the wider world.

One cannot understate the importance of eliminating Bin Laden. He was a symbolic head of the organisation and, as we now know, an operational head of the organisation.

Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about.

Osama bin Laden fervently hoped that attacking the United States would create pressure on American leaders to reduce their support for Middle Eastern regimes. Bin Laden believed that without that American support, the Arab regimes would collapse and would be replaced by Taliban-style rulers.

I kind of think that if you show conspiracy theorists a photo of the dead Bin Laden they will come up with an explanation for why it's really a Photoshopped picture of Bin Laden asleep. Or his dead cousin Fred. Donald Trump apparently believes that Bin Laden is dead, so that ought to be enough for the Middle East.