Obama’s ‘Longest 40 Minutes’

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obama1President Obama described the daring nighttime raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound as one of the “longest 40 minutes of my life,” giving his first detailed account Sunday of the plot to capture the world’s most wanted terrorist.

The mood inside the Situation Room was “very tense,” and it only intensified when one of the helicopters went down early on in the operation, Obama said on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

“There were big chunks of time in which all we were doing was just waiting,” Obama said. “And it was the longest 40 minutes of my life with the possible exception of when [daughter] Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right.”

Obama said he and his top aides, who were depicted in a powerful photo of the Situation Room, “had a sense of when gunfire and explosions took place” on the ground in Pakistan. But he said they “could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound.”

“We also knew when one of the helicopters went down in a way that wasn’t according to plan,” Obama said. “And, as you might imagine, that made us more tense.”

Obama approved the operation without knowing definitively whether bin Laden was inside the compound, calling it a “55/45 situation.” The first indication that the U.S. forces got bin Laden came when they reported back that “Geronimo … has been killed,” Obama said, using the code name for the terrorist.

“And now obviously at that point these guys were operating in the dark with all kinds of stuff going on, so everybody was cautious, but at that point, cautiously optimistic,” Obama said.

CBS’s “60 Minutes,” one of the country’s highest rated programs, dedicated almost the entire hour to Obama’s account of the mission, providing a formidable platform for the White House to extend a victory lap that began shortly after the successful raid May 1.

The White House released behind-the-scenes video of Vice President Joe Biden on the phone that night notifying officials of bin Laden’s death, and Obama congratulating his national security team.

“It was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my presidency but I think for the United States since I’ve been president,” Obama said told reporter Steve Kroft. “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 have been affected I think had given up hope.”

Obama said the decision to raid the compound, rather than bomb it, was “certainly one” of the toughest of his presidency. He said he thought about the missteps of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton’s botched “Black Hawk Down” raid in Somalia and Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue U.S. diplomats held by Iranians.

“I mean, you think about Black Hawk Down. You think about what happened with the Iranian rescue,” Obama said. “Yeah, absolutely. The day before, I was thinking about this quite a bit.”

Obama approved the raid April 29, shortly before he left for a trip that took him to Alabama to survey tornado damage and Florida to watch a space shuttle launch. The next day, he attended the White House Correspondents Association dinner, where, per tradition, he delivered a joke-laced speech.

“This was in the back of my mind all weekend,” Obama said.

“Just the back?” Kroft asked.

“Middle, front,” Obama responded, adding that it was hard to keep his focus.

Obama said he didn’t tell his own family and many of his top aides, so there was no imperative, in his mind, to clue in Pakistani authorities.

“If I’m not revealing to some of my closest aides what we’re doing, then I sure as heck am not going to be revealing it to folks who I don’t know,” Obama said.

Obama offered no apologies for green-lighting a mission that would end up killing bin Laden.

“As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn’t lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done,” he said. “And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.”

{Capitol News Company/Matzav.com}


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