60 Minutes Asks Obama What Pakistan Knew about Bin Laden

I jumped the gun by filing my last post on Saturday. I hadn't the slightest idea that if I had procrastinated a little bit  more I would have been able to capitalize on the President's interview with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, just a couple of hours before the deadline.

Those of you who saw the complete interview will know that Obama said many things that were contrary to my original argument, which I made "thinking aloud" just a few hours after I heard the news that bin Laden was dead. While acknowledging that some "people inside of government, (or) people outside of government" in Pakistan was helping bin Laden hide, he urged caution in reacting to the inevitable truth that somebody in Pakistan screwed us over. That's why he's President and why I shouldn't write about foreign policy. I'm too hawkish. I shoot first and ask questions later.

So I'm not going to paste the parts of the transcript that contradict my overall argument. What Obama and I agree on in the following excerpt is that the United States needs to find out how bin Laden was able to hide in plain sight of the Pakistani government. But the takeaway here is the way Kroft put these questions to the President. The setup for the grand finale... C'mon, you think they knew somethin' don'tcha?...is excellent.

KROFT: You didn't tell anybody in the Pakistani government or the military.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.
KROFT: Or their intelligence community?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.
KROFT: Because you didn't trust?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: As I said, I didn't tell most people here in the White House. I didn't tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security.
KROFT: But you were carrying out this operation in Pakistan.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.
KROFT: You didn't trust 'em?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: If I'm not revealing to some of my closest aides what we're doin', then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don't know.
KROFT: Right. Now the location of this house, the location of the compound just raises all sorts of questions.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Uh-huh.
KROFT: Do you believe people in the Pakistani government, Pakistani intelligence agencies knew that bin Laden was living there?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate. And we've already communicated to them, and they have indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had. But these are questions that we're not gonna be able to answer three or four days after the event. It's gonna take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site.

Others in the administration have been asked these same sorts of questions from journalists, members of Congress and others, who like myself are troubled by the idea that somebody in Pakistan had to know this sonuvabitch was hiding within their borders. I'll have to address that later. But in the meantime, in the interest of fair treatment to the President's remarks on CBS, I would like to post the complete interview here:

...But 60 Minutes hasn't made it available and I don't want to use a bootleg. So this is all they officially put up on YouTube: