forces, either navy s.e.a.l.s or joint special operation forces to do what is in the vernacular called door kicking, went in, subdued the target, got the target set out of there and they got out of there as quickly as possible before any potential reinforcements or other assistance could be brought in to fight the americans. the fact that there were no casualty, the fact that there were no injuries at all among the americans as i understand is testimony to how well-trained and frankly how well-experienced these forces are. when we look at the intelligence and all the information which is slowly coming out about this compound where bin laden was living, it was a massive compound built maybe five years ago. huge tall fences and bin laden had been there with his youngest wife maybe since late last year. could there be any doubt that the someone within the pakistani government or within the pakistani intelligence knew that bin laden was there?
capacity and can get lucky. and certainly the death of bin laden is something that a number of people around the world will try and take revenge, particularly in a country where he s just been killed, because the people motivated by these ideas regard the united states not only as an enemy but the pakistani government itself, 3,000 pakistani civilians have been killed by groups motivate the by al qaeda s ideology in the past several years and bin laden and his number two ayman al zawahiri have made it a point to attack the pakistani state and military in the last several year. one last quick question, did who knew in pakistan within the pakistani government that bin laden was where he was? i don t think we know the answer to that, john. okay. peter, thank you very much. peter bergen live for us this evening in washington. we appreciate it. thanks. all right. we want to take a step back for just a moment with some background on osama bin laden s life before the 9/11 attacks
mission. as nick paton wash was reporting pakistani officials say they were on the ground as this was taking place. u.s. officials have been emphatically saying, no, that is not true. they did not inform the pakistani officials until after the raid took place. one official told is now telling us that the pakistanis may have been helpful and instrumental in terms of piecing the mission together but that the pakistanis did not know that the u.s. was directly targeting osama bin laden in that compound. rosemary. all right, chris lawrence with that new information. appreciate that. well, of course, as we heard news of bin laden s death spread rapidly around the world and heard specifically from the israeli prime minister. let s go to phil black who is live in jerusalem. so, phil, explain to us what is the feeling there now as this news spreads, as people sort of absorb this and try to digest what exactly this means globally
meanwhile, al qaeda continued to operate from along that border and operate through its affiliates across the world. and so shortly after taking office, i directed leon panetta, the director of the cia, to make the killing or capture of bin laden the top priority of our war against al qaeda. even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network. then last august, after years of paintaking work by our intelligence community, i was briefed on a possible lead to bin laden. it was far from certain and it took many months to run this thread to ground. i met repeated with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin laden hiding within a compound deep inside pakistan. and finally last week, i determined that we had enough intelligence to take action and authorized an operation to get osama bin laden and bring him to
following developments at the pentagon. he joins us live now with some new information on that operation. so, chris, what are you learning? reporter: yeah, rosemary, we re learning now from a u.s. official that in terms of finding out exactly that it was osama bin laden, we re told that the assault team that went into that compound said that they thought just by visual recognition that they thought the description matched bin laden but also did some facial recognition technology among other things to positively identify him as bin laden. we re also hearing that emphatically that the body of osama bin laden will not be brought back to the united states. they say it will the disposition of the body will be done under islamic law but the exact details of that are still being worked out. we re also getting some new information about this whole idea and this real controversy that is starting to come out about the relationship of the pakistani officials to this