The People Who Chased Bin Laden Around the Globe Tell All in ‘American Manhunt’ Trailer
The people who spent years tracking down Osama Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks share their stories in the new trailer for American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden, a three-part docuseries premiering March 10 on Netflix.
Directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, American Manhunt features interviews with an array of U.S. government officials who played a role in the mission. The new trailer begins with one official recalling the words of Cofer Black, the CIA’s then-chief of counterterrorism, who told former president George W. Bush after 9/11, “If you let me do it, I’ll have flies walking on their eyeballs in six weeks.”
Of course, the search took much, much longer than that. Over the next decade, bin Laden was repeatedly able to avoid capture until, finally, he was located at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The final part of the trailer shows the lead-up to the raid that ultimately ended in bin Laden’s death.
In a statement, Loushy and Sivan said their aim was to tell this story “in a different way than the history books.” Like their past work together (The Devil Next Door, Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis) their aim was to focus on “people, not nations” who are “facing impossible dilemmas and making tough decisions.”
Loushy and Sivan continued, “American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden does not tell the story of the United States and the War on Terror. It tells the story of the people tasked to find the world’s most wanted terrorist and bring him to justice. It took them 12 years, a hunt that changed their lives, America, and the world as we know it. To understand history, we must look beyond the maps and superpowers to the people who were there, on the ground, in the meeting rooms, on the helicopter, and in the Oval Office. Our goal was to transport the viewers into these places, in real time, with no hindsight, taking the driver’s seat and ask them: ‘What would you do?’ For us, the best way to understand history is to truly experience it.”