President Obama told CBS’ 60 Minutes he was no more than 55% certain that Osama bin Laden was even inside a Pakistan compound when he ordered the raid that led to the death of the al-Qaeda terrorist leader a week ago.
“At the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation,” Obama said in the interview broadcast Sunday night. “I mean we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there.”
“Had he not been there,” Obama added, “then there would have been some significant consequences.”
Obama — who recalled failed helicopter missions in Somalia in 1993 and Iran in 1980 — said he decided that the potential rewards outweighed the risks because “we have devoted enormous blood and treasure in fighting back against al-Qaeda” since the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden organized.
“I said to myself that if we have a good chance of — not completely defeating, but badly disabling al-Qaeda — then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men,” Obama said.
Also in the 60 Minutes interview — parts of which have dribbled out since it was taped Wednesday and Thursday — Obama said:
•He hopes bin Laden’s death will lead to an end of the Afghanistan war. “I think what it does is it sends a signal to those who might have been affiliated with terrorist organizations … that they’re going to be on the losing side of this proposition,” Obama said.
•Analysts are examining records removed from bin Laden’s compound, believing “it can give us leads to other terrorists that we’ve been looking for a long time,” as well as “a better sense of existing plots that might have been there … and their methods of communicating.”
•The U.S. is investigating how the al-Qaeda founder was able to “hide in plain sight” in Pakistan for so long. “We know he was there at least five years,” Obama told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes.
•He refused to release photos of bin Laden’s corpse so that they could not be used as “an incitement to additional violence.”
•Aides planned bin Laden’s burial at sea in accordance with Muslim traditions.
Praising the performance of U.S. special forces and intelligence agencies, Obama said he first saw evidence of the Pakistani compound back in August. Obama said “vigorous planning” for a raid began “early this year,” and that his number top concern was, “can our guys get in and get out safely?”
The president also told 60 Minutes about the anxiety and tension in the White House Situation Room as the operation unfolded:
“There were big chunks of time in which all we were doing was just waiting. And it was the longest 40 minutes of my life with the possible exception of when (daughter) Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right. It was a very tense situation.”
And then …
“There was a point — before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base — where they said,’Geronimo … is … has … been killed. And Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden. And now obviously at that point these guys were operating in the dark with all kinds of stuff going on — so everybody was cautious. But at that point cautiously optimistic.”
Obama also recalled the first words he spoke to his national security team after the mission: “We got him.”
While somewhat nervous throughout the mission planning process, Obama told 60 Minutes there is one thing he never lost sleep over: “The possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done.”
Anyone who questions that bin Laden got what he deserved, Obama added, “needs to have their head examined.”
