.png)
President Barack Obama (L) makes a point during one in a series of meetings in the Situation Room of the White House discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, May 1 in Washington. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon is pictured at right. (Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images)
The U.S. government is interested in accessing al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s three widows and any intelligence material left behind at bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan compound, U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said on Sunday.
His three widows and several children, who remained in the compound even after U.S. commandos killed bin Laden on May 2, are believed by the United States to now be in Pakistani army custody.
Donilon told host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press that the United States has requested, but not yet received access to the three widows or other information collected by Pakistani intelligence from bin Laden’s compound, leading to further speculation that the Pakistani government had been hiding bin Laden.
“We haven’t seen evidence that the government knew about [bin Laden hiding in Pakistan], but they need to investigate that,” said Donilon, according to an NBC transcript of his remarks. “And they need to provide us with intelligence, by the way, from the compound, that they’ve gathered, including access to Osama bin Laden’s three wives whom they have in … custody.”
“But it is important to underscore here that we need to act in our national interest. We have had difficulty with Pakistan, as I said. But we’ve also had to work very closely with Pakistan in our counter-terror efforts. More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than anyplace else.”
Access to the women could answer questions such as whether Pakistan helped bin Laden hide in the country and give details about bin Laden’s day-to-day life.
Although Pakistan has yet to share with Washington the information it collected, U.S. forces managed to seize for themselves computers, hard disks, thumb drives, and documents from the compound after they killed bin Laden and up to four other people.
On the other hand, the United States did not share with Pakistan or any other government its operation to kill bin Laden. Donilon said that leaking the plan to any other government “would’ve been to lose control of dissemination, which would not been the national interest.”
“So we only shared this operation with a very small circle within our own government,” he said.
Even though al-Qaeda’s powerful leader has been eliminated, Donilon said the United States cannot declare that al-Qaeda is “strategically defeated” or that Americans are any safer.“[Al-Qaeda continues] to be a threat to the United States,” Donilon said. “But we have taken a really important milestone in terms of […] taking down this organization.”
