Bin Laden Payback?: Pakistan 'Must Have' Blown U.S. Spy's Cover
Tensions between the United States and Pakistan are rising - which top level officials have already anticipated - in the wake of a momentous U.S. Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden in northern Pakistan last week.
In an interview taped just days after the raid which aired on Sunday, President Barack Obama said Pakistan had been a strong counterterrorism partner with us since 9/11, asserting that there had been disagreements where the U.S. has wanted the Pakistani government to push harder and for various concerns, they might have hesitated.
Obama indicated that the strained relationship would continue.
And those differences are real. And they'll continue, Obama said on CBS' 60 Minutes program on Sunday in comments from the interview taped last Wednesday.
In the latest flare up, unidentified sources have allegedly revealed the name of the CIA station Chief in Islamabad to private Pakistani media, although U.S. reports immediately said the name wasn't real.
The editor of Pakistani right wing newspaper which picked up the story speculated that the source must have come from within a Pakistani government agency.
Pressure has been rising on all sides of the government to unearth what kind of support bin Laden had been receiving.
It has to have been released by some government agency, said Salim Bokhari, the editor of the Nation newspaper, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The Nation has previously issued reports accusing American diplomats of working as spies for the CIA.
The Nation picked up a story by private Pakistani news outlet ARY News which on Friday reported a meeting between the head of Pakistan's spy agency and the American spy chief in Pakistan.
The meeting included Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence, and the station chief of the CIA in Islamabad, ARY News said citing unnamed sources.
At the meeting, Pasha protested that the CIA had not divulged the May 2 raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, about 30 miles north of Islamabad.
Obama was asked in the interview which aired Sunday whether he trusted the Pakistanis. He indicated that he didn't.
If I'm not revealing to some of my closes aides what we're doing, then I sure as heck am not going to be revealing it to folks I don't know, Obama said.
Obama himself asserted that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan in the interview. However he stopped short of making direct accusations as a slew of investigations into the incident take place.
But we don't know who or what that support network was, Obama said.
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, Obama said.
Obama said that U.S. had 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.
He said that it would take some time to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather at bin Laden's compound.
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