So Pakistan is a country that I'm very fond of and have spent a lot of time, but it is a country where conspiracy theories have a life of their own.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

I am very suspicious of the notion that somehow bin Laden was a media creation... Bin Laden's actions made him into a big deal. Not the media.

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

Bin Laden was 200 miles away from the area where all of these drone strikes were taking out his key leaders in al-Qaida. He was able to indulge in his hobbies... He was making occasional video tapes and audio tapes for release to the wider world.

In February I secured permission to enter Osama bin Laden's compound in the northern Pakistani city of Abbottabad, where he was killed and where he had lived for the last half-decade of his life; the first, and only, journalist to do so.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.