james rosen takes a look at that live from washington. james. >> reporter: jon, good afternoon.or its complexity and success, the bin laden mission as you rightly note will be studied for decades and raises the question of whether america's spy apparatus so widely disparaged has its mojo back and whether america's adversaries will accordingly feel less emboldened. older generations will recall israel's similar success in tracking down nazi officer adolph ikeman in 196o. fully 15 years after the end of world war ii, mast add agents kidnapped ikeman, drugged him and spirited him aboard a commercial flight, no less, to jerusalem, where he stood trial for his role in the hol caust and was ultimately hanged. morale at america's 16 spy agencies has risen and fallen over the years, from successes in iran and latin america to failures at the bay of pigs and in iraq. with bin laden now gone, former intelligence officers alternated between expressions of triumphth and warnings about repeating our errors of the past. >> we're the only country that can carry this off. this is a coordinated

let's get over to james rosen who is reporting on this from washington for us. know, the mind goes back to the cole, the embassy bombings, a huge, tragic litany of work by this horrible man. >> reporter: there is a lot history here martha. those images of the crowds of young americans whooping and hollering out on the streets last night served as a kind of poetic book end to the images we saw ten years ago right after 9/11 when some palestinians could be taken to the streets in celebration. >> i can hear you, the rest of the world hears you,. [yelling] >> and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. [cheering] >> reporter: that u.s. led coalition drove the taliban from power in afghanistan and scattered the al-qaida network. the world's number one terrorist was nearly captured that december in the hills of tora bora but escaped. allies came to power in kabul and islamabad. but they regrouped and remain a potent even knee today. >> the gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that weapons of mass destruction pose

james rosen is taking a hook at all of this. -- a look at all of this. he's live in washington. >> reporter: good morning. not yet a week old, the killing of bin laden has sur passed all landmark news events in the last 100 years across an unprecedented number of communications platforms. every data nugget is the stuff of breaking news and water cooler discussion. yet the early words often prove false. the bulk of misstatements concern two important points. first, whether bin laden participated in a fire fight which we now know he did not, and whether they used women as shields. shifting storylines produce starkly different accounts from top officials. >> he was engaged in a fire fight with those who entered the area of the house he was in, and whether he got off any rounds i, quite frankly, didn't know. in the room with bib laden -- bin laden was his wife. she was shot in the leg but not killed. >> reporter: carney went on to say that bin laden was not armed. cia director panetta acknowledged that the national security team was in the dark about what wa