Washington: US President Barack Obama has visited headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to congratulate the top spy outfit for its role in killing of the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
"Today I've returned just to say thank you, on behalf of all Americans and people around the world, because you carried on. You stayed focused on your mission. You honoured the memory of your fallen colleagues.
"In helping to locate and take down Osama bin Laden, you made it possible for us to achieve the most significant victory yet in our war to defeat al Qaeda," Obama said yesterday in his address to the CIA officials at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
"I wanted every single one of you to know, whether you work at the CIA or across the community, at every step of our effort to take out bin Laden, the work you did and the quality of the intelligence that you provided made the critical difference - to me, to our team on those helicopters, to our nation," he said.
"After I directed that getting bin Laden be the priority, you hunkered down even more, building on years of painstaking work; pulling together, in some cases, the slenderest of intelligence streams, running those threads to ground until you found that courier and you tracked him to that compound," Obama said.
The President said that since he was briefed about Laden's whereabouts last summer, the spying agency had built the strongest intelligence network in their bid to trace bin laden and also appreciated their effort that led to the discovery and killing of the most dreaded terrorist in the world.
"And when I was briefed last summer, you had built the strongest intelligence case against - in terms of where bin Laden was since Tora Bora. In the months that followed, including all those meetings in the Situation Room, we did what sound intelligence demands.
"We pushed for more collection. We pushed for more evidence. We questioned our assumptions. You strengthened your analysis. You didn t bite your tongue and try to spin the ball, but you gave it to me straight each and every time," Obama said.
Acknowledging that when the time came to actually make the decision, they didn't know for sure that bin Laden was there, he said, adding that the evidence was circumstantial and the risks, especially to the lives of special operations forces were huge.
"I knew that the consequences of failure could be enormous. But I made the decision that I did because I had absolute confidence in the skill of our military personnel and I had confidence in you. I put my bet on you. And now the whole world knows that that faith in you was justified," he said.
Comments
0 comment