TV Show Review: “American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden”

After seeing posts of it on my timeline last week, I found time to watch “American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden”, Netflix’s May 2025 three-part mini-series. I completed it some minutes ago.

The series doesn’t waste a frame. From the chilling footage of 9/11 to the almost surgical execution of the Navy SEALs’ raid in Abbottabad, every episode is constructed with a clarity that respects its audience’s intelligence while unpacking the labyrinth of politics and intelligence failures that made the manhunt so perilous, and so delayed.

Many do not know but the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden would likely have ended far earlier had President George W. Bush acted decisively in the first three months after 9/11. They had him but the go-ahead needed from the higher-up just refused to come. So, he escaped. The docuseries doesn’t say this outright, but the implication is unmissable. That missed window gave Osama Bin Laden time to vanish, while his ideology continued to inspire a generation of extremists, resulting in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.

Yet, for all the tragedy, this documentary doesn’t lose hope in Western institutions. It lays bare the contradictions of a civilization that opposed the very interrogation techniques it employed to avoid another 9/11 tragedy and figure out the whereabout of this coldhearted killer while allowing dissenters to document and criticize those methods publicly. Very publicly. That, in itself, is a chilling paradox but also a testament to a system still tethered to self-critique. Or in which civilization in the history of our world does this happen so blatantly?

One of the most disturbing revelations is Bin Laden’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. What they described as “an American Hiroshima”. The series reminds us how fragile global security truly is, especially when those with deadly intent brush shoulders with rogue scientists and sympathetic states.

And what of those states? Perhaps the most telling moments involve the unspoken (and at times, spoken) cooperation between Middle Eastern regimes and the West. While anti-American sentiment flourished in the streets of these countries, backdoor deals and intelligence-sharing quietly moved the needle toward the takedown of many terrorist cells around the world.

You’d be stunned by the sheer scale of security lapses, even within the CIA. Can you imagine a man who had been inside an al-Qaeda site for many months showing up at a secure CIA facility, and no one searches him? Not a single security protocol is triggered as he walks through the gates, despite never been seen by anyone in the intelligence community before. He’s granted access to one of the most fortified compounds in the world. And what does he do? He detonates a bomb, killing everyone inside. If this were a scene in a thriller, you’d call it implausible. But as the saying goes: reality is often stranger than fiction.

Still, the triumph was in the details: the CIA’s exact replica of the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden had been hiding for years, the countless military contingency plans (not just Plan A, considering Plan A failed), and the guts it took for President Obama to greenlight a high-stakes mission near Pakistan’s own military academy without informing their government. The distrust ran that deep, and you may determine it’s for good reason when you watch the series.

The final raid is portrayed not as a sleek Hollywood strike, but as a nerve-wracking, flawed operation where everything could’ve gone wrong. And yet, the result was what America, and much of the world, had waited a decade for: justice.

Quiz: Where do you think the United States buried the body of Osama Bin Laden?

I saw a funny post about how America didn’t win because Bin Laden didn’t get a chance to say his last words. Why is it important to know a terrorist’s last words when he has dozens of tapes about his intent to destroy western civilization?

For me, it’s a reminder that the threat of religious extremism didn’t die in Abbottabad. If anything, it’s morphing and hiding in plain sight, often among those who sound suspiciously sympathetic online.

But don’t get it twisted: the killing of Osama Bin Laden was a win; morally, tactically, and symbolically. “American Manhunt” documents that win with the gravity and nuance it deserves.

Rating: 5/5 stars