Barack Obama on the operation to find, kill Osama bin Laden | 60 Minutes Archive
In a Nutshell
Obama made the high-stakes call to send Navy SEALs into Pakistan on a 55-45 intelligence assessment that Bin Laden was in the compound, choosing a ground raid over drone strikes to confirm the kill, recover intelligence, and minimize civilian casualties. The 40-minute operation succeeded despite a helicopter crash and other complications, yielding a massive intelligence haul and ending a decade-long hunt. Obama stressed the primacy of protecting the operators, keeping the mission secret even from his own family and most aides, and decided against releasing photos to avoid inciting violence.
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Osama bin Laden changed America. With the September morning in 2001, he introduced fear and ingrained the threat of terrorism into the daily lives of anyone who lives in a big city, travels by air, or enters a federal building. For more than a decade, bin Laden managed to elude the US military and intelligence establishment and taunted three US presidents. That finally ended last Sunday, and the last thing Bin Laden saw was a Navy Seal in the third floor bedroom of his compound in Pakistan.
President Obama stated that it was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for his presidency, but for the United States since he had been president. Obviously, Bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism but a mass murderer who had eluded justice for so long and so many families who had been affected had given up hope. For us to be able to definitively say we got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States was something that all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.
Every time Obama sent young men and women into a war theater that was a tough decision. Whenever he wrote a letter to a family who had lost a loved one, it was sobering. This was a very difficult decision in part because the evidence that we had was not absolutely conclusive. This was circumstantial evidence that he was going to be there. Obviously, it entailed enormous risk to the guys that were sent in there.
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