LIVE TWITTERING THE BIN LADEN OP – AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  This story is going viral.  A Pakistani live Twittered the bin Laden operation without realizing what it was.   From London's Telegraph:

Sohaib Athar, who uses the Twitter handle "ReallyVirtual", recorded the helicopter attack that led to the death of the al-Qaeda leader.

At 1am local time, he noted on his Twitter page that a helicopter was hovering overhead, a "rare event" in sleepy Abbottabad.

The noise from the aircraft was annoying, and he tweeted: "Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/".

But the commotion only got worse.

Minutes later he wrote: "A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S"

Then, when the sound of the helicopter stopped following an explosion, he tweeted "seems like my giant swatter worked !"

In a few exchanges with other Twitter users he wrote: "the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani ".

And: "Since taliban (probably) don't have helicpoters, and since they're saying it was not 'ours', so must be a complicated situation".

Shortly later he went offline for a few hours, returning in the morning to work out what had happened.

He retweeted a post from Munzir Naqvi: "I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected."

Soon another Twitter user had confirmed the news. Mr Athar tweeted "RT @ ISuckBigTime: Osama Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. ISI has confirmed it [[ Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood :-/"".

COMMENT:  Watch this guy become a 15-minutes-of-fame American TV star. 

May 2, 2011