Well...I'd just like to point out that not swallowing everything the government says as 100% true is hardly being a conspiracy theorist.
Around this topic especially, it seems as if questioning anything at all gets you lumped in with people who think jfk was abducted by little green men.
Suggesting that outright killing someone who could potentially have incredibly valuable intel on AQ makes zero sense and flies in the face of every standard operating procedure of every military and intelligence service on earth...
CIA doesn't share everything they know and do with the public?? Haha good one, let me just grab my tinfoil hat too! :lol:
Just think about this - even if they wanted to capture him, it's impossible. Politically, practically impossible.
They'd be unable to hold him indefinitely without facing mounting pressure from all sides about him being treated poorly/treated too well, whether the govt was just as bad as the terrorists if they allow torture, the legality of snatching him from foreign soil to extradite him to the US to face trial without due process, whether he would recieve a fair trial anyway, who would try him, whether his trial would just become a rallying point to ignite even more extremism, threats to break him out, calls to just kill him already...seriously, it would be a fucking nightmare.
And yet this way is so neat, let's say he is still alive just hypothetically. They say he was armed and resisted - no heat for supposedly killing him. American public is told he's dead and so they can rest easy knowing there's been some "justice". Obama probably doesn't know specifically that he isn't dead, at least not on the record, so that he can maintain plausible deniability if he's ever asked. Since he's declared dead, he doesn't officially exist - they can do what they want with him, for as long as they want, probably somewhere outside American soil, no legal red tape...he's already dead remember?
I don't think that's a conspiracy theory, that's counterterrorism doing its job. As opposed to shooting him in the head and dumping him off the side of a boat.
Oh and let me add to that, the best kind of intel is the kind the other side doesn't know you have. Or at least doesn't know for sure.