Some 36 hours after the world first learnt of the US commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the White House changed parts of its story. A woman was killed, its spokesman said, but she was not Bin Laden's wife - who survived after being shot in the leg. Bin Laden did not, as had earlier been claimed, use his wife as a human shield; she was injured when she tried to challenge one of the US commandos. And Bin Laden was not, after all, armed, although he did, the spokesman said, put up some resistance. The new version - no wife as human shield, no weapon - makes [bin Laden] more ordinary and more vulnerable. It also raises further questions. If the first version was incorrect, perhaps even to an extent spun" for a certain effect, might there not be room for doubt about other aspects of the official narrative? About, say, whether the crucial intelligence about Bin Laden was extracted from al-Qa'ida operatives under torture, which might appear to justify such methods and lift some of the opprobrium from the previous US administration and the CIA. A no less pertinent question that the new version raises is whether Bin Laden was ever actually given a chance to surrender and whether he might have been taken alive rather than dead. When President Obama said that justice had been done, was this - strictly speaking - justice, or was it cold-blooded retribution?