Monday, January 30, 2012

Panetta on 60 Minutes

The full transcript of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's 60 Minutes interview is available here

The video is available (theoretically) here.

To be honest, there isn't much here on the hunt for Osama bin Laden that wasn't already leaked ahead of the interview.  But the interviewer, Scott Pelley, does make one misleading statement in his narration that deserves comment.  At 7:05 of the video, Pelley says:
The first challenge ordered by the president was to rethink the search for Osama bin Laden.  There hadn't been a good lead since the U.S. lost him in 2001 in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.  Within a year and a half of Panetta taking over as director of Central Intelligence, the U.S. tracked al Qaeda couriers to a house in a town called Abbottabad, deep inside Pakistan.
This suggests that the Obama administration's "rethink" is what led to bin Laden.  But in reality, the key intelligence was gained in interrogations dating back to the early Bush administration, including the questioning of Hassan Gul.  Gul had been captured by Kurdish forces near the Iranian border in January 2004 carrying a compact disc with a letter from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.  These interrogations revealed the existence of a man known by the nom de guerre "Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti," one of the few couriers trusted by bin Laden.  Painstaking detective work over the next three years -- not some magical "rethink" -- produced al-Kuwaiti's family name in 2007, which subsequently enabled an intercepted call with another al-Qa'ida operative in 2009 to finally lead U.S. intelligence to the region of Pakistan where al-Kuwaiti operated.

While Panetta and the Obama administration deserve credit for the successful operation, the intelligence breakthrough that led to the targeting of the Abbottabad compound was the productive of a cumulative effort that began well before President Obama entered the White House.

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