In an interview to be aired tomorrow night, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta tells 60 Minutes he believes Pakistani officials had to know that Osama bin Laden was hiding at the Abbottabad compound in which he was discovered and killed by SEAL Team Six last May.
"I personally have always felt that somebody must have had some sense of what was happening at this compound," says Panetta, who was the CIA director during the planning and execution of the raid. "[T]his compound had 18-foot walls. It was the largest compound in the area. So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question, ‘What the hell's going on there?’”
Panetta statement appears to contradict the previous Obama Administration position that that nobody in the Pakistani government knew of bin Laden's location prior to the raid, espoused publicly by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Is Panetta's statement a by-product of deteriorating U.S.-Pakistani relations or of new intelligence discovered in the intervening eight months?
In fact, there may be less than meets the eye here, as Panetta admits: "I don't have any hard evidence, so I can't say it for a fact. There's nothing that proves the case. But, as I said, my personal view is that somebody somewhere probably had that knowledge."
No comments:
Post a Comment