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The Disgrace of Secondhand Judgment in the Aftermath of Abbottabad

The dispute over the Abbottabad raid has taken on a strange and unnecessary afterlife. What began as a narrow disagreement about sequence has metastasized into a public referendum on credibility, conducted largely by people who were not present. The result is not clarity but spectacle, with one man’s service repeatedly subjected to suspicion by commentators safely removed from the event itself.

Start with the facts that have never moved. Rob O’Neill was on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. No serious party disputes that. He moved through the house. He entered the room. He fired. Bin Laden died. What remains is a debate over seconds in a darkened stairwell, not over whether O’Neill belongs in the story at all.

The only person offering a materially different account of shot sequence is Matt Bissonnette, and even there the disagreement is narrow. Bissonnette has never accused O’Neill of fabricating his role or inventing his presence. He has not turned his recollection into a campaign against another man’s legitimacy. His disagreement remains confined to sequence, not identity. That restraint matters. It reveals how modest the dispute actually is.

That restraint stands in contrast to the posture adopted by the hosts of the Anti-Hero Podcast, particularly Brent Tucker. Tucker has repeatedly positioned himself as an arbiter of truth, arguing that when a story is true its details do not change. It is a tidy rule and an appealing one, especially to audiences far removed from combat. It is also a brittle standard, one that collapses under even modest scrutiny.

What is difficult to square is not that Tucker questions aspects of the raid. Reasonable people can disagree about sequence. It is that he does so from a position entirely removed from the event itself. Tucker was not on the Abbottabad raid. He was not in the unit. He did not move through that house, up that stairwell, or into that room. And yet he has repeatedly assumed the authority to discredit the account of a man who did.

There is something fundamentally askew about this arrangement. Skepticism is healthy; adjudication is another matter. When distance from an event becomes the basis for moral certainty rather than restraint, inquiry hardens into something else entirely. At that point, the posture stops resembling analysis and begins to look, quite plainly, like reputational demolition. I cannot overstate how corrosive it is to have strangers attempt to dismantle your name over events they did not witness and were never part of.

I recognize the machinery because I have been caught in it myself. As I was leaving Avdiivka in Ukraine in 2023, I survived a fragging attempt and shortly afterward departed Chosen Company, my unit. What followed was depressingly familiar. A YouTuber with secondhand connections to people involved — but who was not present himself — published an attack on my name. The video circulated quickly through the foreign-fighter community, and an online mob formed around it. Strangers who had never met me, never operated with me, and had no direct knowledge of the events filled in the gaps with confidence. The accusations escalated. People went out of their way not only to discredit me, but to harass my family, friends, and even former girlfriends—individuals entirely removed from the war. The resemblance to what has since happened to O’Neill is difficult to ignore.

When I spoke directly with O’Neill, I asked him the question that has animated years of commentary: whether his account of the raid had ever meaningfully changed. His answer was simple. It had not.

What shifts, he said, are the same compressions familiar to anyone trying to describe seconds-long violence in retrospect. The sequence, the setting, and his actions inside the room remain the same.

What has changed is the audience around the story. O’Neill told me that his children are now old enough to read the comments. They see the accusations and insinuations. They ask questions. He answers them as best he can. There is something disorienting about watching a moment that once belonged to history be endlessly re-litigated in front of your family by people who were never there.

The escalation has now reached the courts. In late 2025, O’Neill filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $25 million, alleging that repeated insinuations and edited commentary caused professional and personal harm. Whatever the outcome, the filing marks a recognition that this stopped being a good-faith debate some time ago.

At some point, the question stops being who fired which shot and becomes why a settled record is still being interrogated by people who were never there. Rob O’Neill was one of the men who went into that house in Abbottabad, climbed those stairs, and finished a mission the United States had been pursuing for nearly a decade. He crossed the threshold. He engaged the target. Osama bin Laden’s life ended there, and with it came a measure of justice long owed to the victims of September 11th and their families. O’Neill’s account has remained fixed to that reality. It is not his story that has shifted, but the behavior of those who, from a safe distance, continue to question the legitimacy of men who actually went in and did the work.