Quotes of the day

“A senior official in Pakistan’s civilian government told ABC News, ‘Elements of Pakistan intelligence — probably rogue or retired — were involved in aiding, abetting and sheltering the leader of al Qaeda,’ the strongest public statement yet from the Pakistani government after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

Advertisement

“This is based on the government’s judgment that the number of years bin Laden spent in Abbottabad — and it now appears in a village outside the city of Haripur — would have been impossible without help, possibly from someone in the middle tier of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, who grew up fighting alongside the mujahidin against the Soviets, said the official.

“According to the official, the military and ISI have been weeding some of them out but many remain.”

***
“‘Osama bin Laden did not give any signal that he was intending or had any intention to surrender,’ said Donilon. ‘And in those settings, our forces, I think, made the absolutely appropriate judgment that he was a threat, given all the techniques we knew al Qaeda to use.”

The killing of bin Laden also led to the single largest cache of information ever recovered from a senior terrorist.

“‘The CIA is describing it to us as the size of a small college library,’ said Donilon…

“Bin Laden’s killing has eroded – perhaps temporarily – some of the bipartisanship plaguing Washington of late. Once President Obama was told U.S. forces involved in the attack were safely back in Afghanistan, ‘the first person he called outside the White House was President Bush,’ Donilon said.”

Advertisement

***
Via Mediaite.

***
PRESIDENT OBAMA: …I mean keep in mind this is something, first of all, that that wasn’t just our doing. Obviously since 2001, countless folks in our intelligence community and our military had worked on this issue. President Bush had obviously devoted a lot of resources to this, and so there was a cumulative effort and a testament to the capacity of the United States of America to follow through. And to do what we said we’re gonna do. Even across administrations, across party lines and the skill with which our intelligence and military folks operated in this was indescribable…

You know, I got a letter the day after, an e-mail from a young person who had spoken to her dad when she was four years old before the towers collapsed, he was he was in the building. And she described what it had been like for the last ten years growing up, always having that image of her father’s — the sound of her father’s voice, and thinking that she’d never see him again, and watching her mother weep on the phone. And that’s what I thought about…

Advertisement

KROFT: This was one man. This is somebody who’s cast a shadow in this place, in the White House for almost a decade.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: 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. 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.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement