over the culprit behind both the east african embassy attacks and 9/11. what i hear you saying, to reduce this to the cliff notes version of your history there, which was fascinating, if the taliban had basically said to osama bin laden, take your fight somewhere else, either had not let him in, in the mid- 90s, not embraced him in 98, or simply had turned him over in 01, than we would not have gone into afghanistan, the taliban would have stayed there, and there fight with us is something that was ancillary to their overarching objectives? that s a conclusion which i have heard many senior taliban reach. and even now, as they sort of sit more or less in hiding and discuss, you know, what happened, how did we get ourselves into this predicament, many of them have concluded that their own leadership called it wrong back in 2001 by, you know, trying to protect bin laden. also guessing the u.s. wasn t
it shows what they put in place is blocking these attacks. it s that they re the fact that they were aware of every single terror plot that bin laden mentioned in his writings they re taking as a positive sign that they have learned how to catch these guys in the act. but they re going to search through those files, those document, the five computers, for the next weeks, months, until they are sure there s nothing else out there that was under way. all right, kimberly, thank you for your reporting. no question about it, those thumb drives are going to be taken apart. thank you so much for that great report. now to the controversial photo of dead osama bin laden. very few people have actually seen it. yesterday, the cia offered to show it to members of the armed service and intelligence committees in congress. today, they had their first view. senator, thanks for joining us. nice being with you. i have to say, you had been a
capital in 1996. they inherited bin laden. he d already arrived. the taliban had their own business, which was to try and capture afghanistan and try and put an end to the civil war there. osama managed to get into the confidence of the leadership there. in 1998, while in afghanistan, he of course declared war on the crusaders, meaning the united states. after he launched the attacks on the east african embassies of course he goes to the top of the u.s. wanted list and the sole demand the u.s. had of the taliban movement was to hand him other. it was the refusal of the taliban leader, mullah omar, to hand him over, osama bin laden, meant that bin laden was able to carry on with the plotting of the 9/11 attacks. and then of course led to the u.s. intervention in afghanistan, to topple the taliban government, precisely because they d failed to hand
here. certainly nothing wide spread. we haven t seen large-scale attacks either. we ve had some threats by al qaeda linked groups, the pakistani taliban, the afghan taliban have come out and vowed revenge for bin laden s death but, again no large attacks here against civilian targets, military targets or u.s. targets, ever since this raid took place. one other question, can you sense day to day, is the relationship between the united states and pakistan, is it beginning to improve after a lot of heated rhetoric over the past day or two? are things beginning to is the level of rhetoric getting lower? reporter: it is getting lower. but i think people have to see substantial moves by pakistan. that s an indication of them trying to restore confidence. i think even though the temperature is lower a little bit, we ve never seen this relationship so strained, so uncertain. and i think in the coming weeks,
thought was necessary to impose on the united states to get us to change policies in afghanistan. kind of an eerie, sick mentality. describe for us the kinds of writings you see in these documents. some of them were really philosophical. he was trying to calculate what is going to make the american government pull u.s. troops, pull its presence out of the entire arab world. he concluded that the small-scale attacks that al qaeda had been doing around the globe weren t producing those results and he was calculating, does it need to be 1,000 americans dead, 2,000 americans dead or did he have to get his followers to do another 9/11 to change u.s. policy. he concluded that the u.s. public was the center of gravity for the u.s. government. he also was directing them on specific targets like he was saying stop with new york, think about l.a., think about smaller american cities that don t have great security. he was really helping them think through that process. and even helping them dec