President Obama Says Bin Laden Raid Among ‘Longest 40 Minutes’ of Life
U.S. President Barack Obama
Pete Souza/White House via Bloomberg
U.S. President Barack Obama listens during one in a series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House.
U.S. President Barack Obama listens during one in a series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White House. Photographer: Pete Souza/White House via Bloomberg
May 2 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff offer their views on the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by U.S. special forces yesterday in Pakistan. This report also contains comments from Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co.; Paul Rosenzweig, senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation and Richard Falkenrath, a principal at the Chertoff Group and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor. (Source: Bloomberg)
President Barack Obama said monitoring the raid that ended in Osama bin Laden’s death in an Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound was “the longest 40 minutes” of his life, with the possible exception of when his daughter Sasha was gravely ill as a three-month-old baby.
Obama said in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program that he made the decision to send U.S. Navy SEALs in to raid the compound on April 28 and informed his team the next morning. Obama said his participation in the planning of the raid was “about as active as any project that I’ve been involved with since I’ve been president.”
The evidence that bin Laden was there was circumstantial, so when the raid went ahead, “this was still a 55/45 situation,” said Obama. “I mean we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been some significant consequences.”
The president noted the geopolitical risks of landing helicopters and conducting a military operation on the sovereign territory of another country, in a residential neighborhood.
“So if it turns out that it’s a -- wealthy -- you know, prince from Dubai who’s in this compound -- and, you know, we’ve sent Special Forces in -- we’ve got problems,” Obama said.
Past Failures
Obama, 49, also said the failures of past military operations such as the Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980 and the U.S. mission in Somalia in 1993 weighed on him in the days leading up to the raid. “The day before I was thinking about this quite a bit,” Obama said.
Obama said in monitoring the operation from the Situation Room in the White House, “we knew as events unfolded what was happening in and around the compound, but we could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound.”
When U.S. Navy SEALs raided the compound and killed bin Laden, they capped a decade-long pursuit of the al-Qaeda leader. The U.S. lost track of bin Laden during an offensive in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan, where the militant Islamic Taliban harbored bin Laden at the time of the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
“As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out,” Obama said. “Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”
Support Network
Bin Laden had been living in the Pakistan compound for at least five years, Obama said.
“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” Obama said. “But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”
Information seized in the raid may help lead to other individual terrorists and groups and to forestall further attacks, Obama said.
“We anticipate that it can give us leads to other terrorists that we’ve been looking for a long time, other high value targets,” Obama said. “But also, this can give us a better sense of existing plots that might have been there, how they operated and their methods of communicating.”
Obama said he decided not to release a photo of bin Laden’s body because it is “not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff like trophies.”
“There’s no doubt that bin Laden is dead,” Obama said. “Certainly there’s no doubt among al-Qaeda members that he is dead.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Phil Mattingly in Washington at pmattingly@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at Msilva34@bloomberg.net.
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