president said, but spontaneity is not my strong suit, and spontaneity is not a big characteristic in the situation room. that s probably just as well, why you re there and i m here. denis mcdonough, thanks very much. when we come back, how long was osama bin laden hiding in pakistan and did the pakistanis know about it? i ll ask the man who heads up the house homeland security committee.
courage is what finally brought about justice. commander and senator, thank you both very much. thank you, piers. when we come back, with one of president obama s top national security advisers, what he saw and heard in the situation room as the commander in chief learned osama bin laden was dead. [ male announcer ] in 2011, at&t is at work, building up our wireless network all across america. we re adding new cell sites. increasing network capacity, and investing billions of dollars to improve your wireless network experience. from a single phone call to the most advanced data download, we re covering more people in more places than ever before in an effort to give you the best network possible. at&t. rethink possible. [ male announcer ] there s just something about werther s caramel that makes a chocolate so smooth and creamy, you don t just taste it, you feel it. magic
believe in 2005, and he also gave us information. so i think it s fair to say that it was a long road to getting bin laden. but the first major steps on that road resulted from the interrogation, very intense interrogation, of khalid sheikh mohammed and al libby. i do support it, and i m only speaking for myself now when i say this, but i think it was the moral thing to do. i m not defending it, i m actually being very emphatic, being very proactive in supporting it. i use the example, piers, if on september 10th, 2001, we had captured mohammed atta, one of the other 19 conspirators, and we know somewhere in the next several days, 3,000 americans were going to be murdered. i would say the moral thing to do to hold his head under water to save those 3,000 people, do it. and i went to so many wakes and funerals after september 11th, i would never want to go to a wake and funeral and tell a mother or a father or a brother or a sister of someone who was burned to dead, who had to jump 96
the mission to take out osama bin laden may turn out to be the high point of the obama administration. so should the president expect a surge in his popularity? joining me now, jennifer palmieri, former press secretary to john edwards, and cnn political correspondent, mary matalin. let me start with you, mary. i was expecting on the back of the death of bin laden a big bounce in president obama s poll ratings, but it hasn t happened. why? well, he s gotten a measure of credit, which he deserves, it was a commendable decision and execution, but the larger credit really goes to the military and the intelligence communities, 86 and 70% respectably, but he got the president the president rightly gets credit when things go well. i ll say, politically. i m sure jennifer will agree with this. the enduring credit for success is not as enduring as the negative to failure. particularly when it comes to foreign policy. jennifer will remember in the
this is what they train for, every single day. these men had made it through the hardest military training in the world. the basic underwater demolition c.o. training, and on top of that training, they ve got years of experience under their belt, and they would have relentlessly prepared for this specific operation so they could react to any contingency and grrpt uarantee success. the whole thing took 40 minutes. the only casualty was a helicopter, of the four helicopters. it stalled and then was destroyed deliberately. a remarkably cost-free operation in terms of the s.e.a.l.s. there are three principles they would have used in order to bring about that kind of cost-free operation in their planning. one was surprise and then speed and violence of action. so the idea is to hit the enemy when they re not expecting it, hit them fast, and hit them hard. and they clearly did that to great effect when they took out bin laden. this whole issue, whether bin laden was armed or not, seems