Osama bin Laden -How We Missed Getting Him

Our Delta Force Troops were 2000 yards away from Osama bin Laden, and someone up the chain of command would not allow the troops on the ground to do what they knew best how to do...get him.  Yet we still don't know who killed the opportunity to resolve the 911 tragedy.

Fury told 60 Minutes his orders were to kill bin Laden and leave the body with the Afghans.

"Right here you're looking at basically the battlefield from the last location that we had a firm on Osama bin Laden's location," Fury explains to Pelley, looking at a ridgeline with an elevation of about 14,000 feet.

Asked how tough it would be to attack such a position on a scale of one to ten, Fury tells Pelley, "In my experience it’s a ten."

Delta developed an audacious plan to come at bin Laden from the one direction he would never expect.

"We want to come in on the back door," Fury explains. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."

But they didn't take that route, because Fury says they didn't get approval from a higher level. "Whether that was Central Command all the way up to the president of the United States, I'm not sure," he says.

The next option that Delta wanted to employ was to drop hundreds of landmines in the mountain passes that led to Pakistan, which was bin Laden’s escape route.

"First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops. That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. Okay, there a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that," Fury explains.

But they didn't do that either, because Fury says that plan was also disapproved. He says he has "no idea" why.

"How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan that's disapproved by higher headquarters?" Pelley asks.

"In my experience, in my five years at Delta, never before," Fury says.

Rest of story....