"The SEAL team engaged in a prolonged firefight during the raid."
A major exaggeration. This myth derives from the misstatements of Obama administration officials, who spoke to the press before being fully briefed on the details of the raid. "It was a firefight," White House Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan said on May 2, explaining why bin Laden was not captured.
In fact, the SEAL team encountered only a single burst of inaccurate fire, evidently from Ibrahim Ahmed Saeed, the courier who inadvertently led the United States to bin Laden, when they first approached the compound. The team returned fire and immediately killed Saeed. The only other shots fired during the assault were fired by SEALs as they methodically cleared the house room by room, killing Saeed's brother and his wife, bin Laden's son, and the al Qaeda chief himself. This process took more than 15 minutes.
It should be noted that having encountered that initial fire, the team members had to assume that the other occupants of the house were armed and likely to shoot at them, even though this did not happen.
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