Stuff a sock in it

Here's my sage advice. After you get done killing the world's most wanted terrorist, your next step should be to STFU.

Immediately describing various events during the raid which later turned out not to have happened was the one, guaranteed method to make people a) doubt everything else you might say and b) sow confusion about the propriety and ethics of the action. (These are legitimately questionable but we should have these conversations on good information.)

Bragging about the terabytes of data -- "equivalent to a small college library!" whatever that means -- you have captured is the perfect way to make sure that everybody who thinks there's a remote possibility their name and address is in there somewhere will immediately skedaddle. By the time they got done going through the first few gigabytes 17 graduate students had already flown home from Germany to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates; and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar had ordered up a police escort and moved their entourages closer to Pakistani military headquarters, if not right on an army base where U.S. helicopters really won't want to land. Anyway, you know perfectly well that 90% of it is garbage -- the kids playing World of Warcraft, bin Laden looking at pictures of nekkid ladies, the wives downloading recipes, or whatever it is they were doing.

Finally, please do not announce that bin Laden's lair turned out to be an "operational command headquarters" when the only operational command that appeared to be going on there was vague discussion of somebody somehow derailing a train somewhere some day. Especially because the instantaneous reaction is for Senators to start talking about No Ride Lists (as far as I know, you derail a train from the outside, not the inside) and pretty soon, we'll be submitting to cavity searches to board the commuter train.

That's exactly what the whole al Qaeda thing is about, get it? They threaten, possibly credibly and possibly not, to do some nasty thing that amounts to a little more than a minor nuisance compared to the risks of death, injury and sickness that we face every day; and we waste untold billions of dollars on useless charades to make people think we're doing something to prevent it, such as invading Iraq and fighting in a civil war in Afghanistan against people who don't give a shit about the U.S. but only want to govern their own country, not to mention having to get to the airport 2 hours early.

Here's what you do. You kill the guy, then you engage in an eloquent, elegant silence. That would be smart.