Slate’s William Saletan with a useful guide to the next phase of the reporting we’ll be seeing on the killing of Osama Bin Laden. We’ve heard what senior U.S. officials have had to say thus far, but they’re all still playing their cards pretty close to their chests, raising further questions.

Matters of interest items #2-5 from the Slate article:

2. Air cover? Obama authorized the raid early Friday morning, but it didn’t take place till nearly 48 hours later. Why? One possible reason is the weather. Look at the past week’s weather report for Islamabad, the nearest major city. It was cloudy until Sunday, and the first clear break in nighttime cloud cover was Monday morning. Danger Room points out, “It’s unlikely the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command would risk sending in a lightly-protected team to face terrorists capable of shooting down helicopters. That means air cover—most likely armed drones or Air Force gunships.” We know from on-the-ground tweets, as well as from the U.S., that the raid took place around 1 a.m. But drone strikes frequently take place at that hour.

3. Capture or kill? The U.S. says it killed Bin Laden because he “resisted” the commandos. But did they try hard to capture him alive? I doubt it. A U.S. official says the government dumped his body at sea quickly because “we don’t want a bunch of people going to [a] shrine” for him. The same logic argued against putting him on trial, which would have made him even more of a martyr.

4. Intel bonus? The U.S. says its team “was on the compound for under 40 minutes.” That includes the entry, the firefight, blowing up its crippled helicopter, and extracting Bin Laden’s corpse. Was that enough time to find and grab anything useful that might further unravel Bin Laden’s network? Probably not, but we won’t know till later.

5. Gitmo vindicated? The U.S. says “detainees” provided the initial information about Bin Laden’s courier, which eventually led to the raid. In its briefing, the Obama White House didn’t specify where those detainees were located. But the Times says more: “Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators.” Without Gitmo, would we have found him?

Read more of What Really Happened in Abbottabad? Eight mysteries about the killing of Osama Bin Laden (Slate)