"If it's a wealthy prince from Dubai who's in this compound, we've got problems"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Though the raid on Usama bin Laden's compound was the result of years of intelligence gathering and training, President Obama stressed that the mission was a gamble up until the very end.

In an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" aired Sunday, Obama discussed the many ways the operation could have gone wrong. He said the mission looked "promising" from the start, but that it entailed "enormous risk" -- the president noted that when the ball started rolling on the operation last August, officials had "no direct evidence" that bin Laden was living there.

As has been revealed in several briefings and interviews over the past week, U.S. officials began to feel more confident that a high-level Al Qaeda operative like bin Laden was living there the more they found out about the compound in northern Pakistan. But Obama said, "At the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation. I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there."

"Obviously, we're going into the sovereign territory of another country and landing helicopters and conducting a military operation. And so if it turns out that it's a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who's in this compound -- and, you know, we've sent Special Forces in -- we've got problems," Obama said.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/08/bin-laden-raid-fraught-enormous-risk-obama-says/

[napi21]

1. Of course that's true, but that's not what appened. nt