Osama bin Laden was dead about 20 minutes after U.S. commandos landed at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, last week "a U.S. official" has told CBS News' David Martin.
The official, saying that the al-Qaida leader was killed "relatively early" in the operation, tells CBS that some members of the Navy SEAL team spent about half the 40 minutes they were at the compound collecting computers, hard drives, thumb drives and other evidence about bin Laden's terrorist network.
There is so much evidence, CBS reports, that:
"A task force is now working around-the-clock to analyze and exploit that intel, and not just the videos released over the weekend, but a staggering 2.7 terabytes of data, the equivalent of 220 million pages of text. A U.S. official says the task force comes up with another intelligence nugget on the average of once an hour, including leads on everything from other terrorists leaders to how bin laden communicated with the rest of al Qaeda."
Other stories this morning related to bin Laden's death include:
-- The Guardian 's look at Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, one of bin Laden's wives, and the matchmaker who found her for him. She is being detained by Pakistani authorities and U.S. officials want to question her. Matchmaker Rashad Mohammed Saeed Ismael, a Yemeni sheikh, tells the Guardian that he and other supports of al-Qaida in Yemen want her to be sent there, her home country.
-- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) "is headed to Pakistan in hopes of mending relations with the government that have become increasingly frayed since the U.S. raid over the last week," Politico reports. Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, "will be the first U.S. official to visit the country since the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound."
-- "Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as those in the equivalent House committees, will be allowed to view the photographs taken of Osama bin Laden after he was killed, a U.S. official told CNN Tuesday. The viewings will take place at CIA headquarters in northern Virginia at a time to be decided, the official said."
Note: NPR follows Associated Press style on the spelling of al-Qaida. Other news organizations use different spellings.
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