RSS
By DON WALTON
From: Lincoln Journal Star
Sen. Ben Nelson said Wednesday he wants a Senate investigation to determine whether Pakistani officials knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding and whether they may have shielded him from discovery.
"It seems some people in Pakistan must have known he was there," Nelson said during a telephone conference call from Washington.
Nelson sent a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, formally requesting a full investigation.
Meanwhile, Nelson said, he and other senators were told at a briefing that computer hard drives and other documents snatched during the raid that killed bin Laden "may provide a lot of detail on the location of other high-value targets."
That material also "may help aid in determining whether or not (Pakistani) officials were looking the other way" while bin Laden lived in a compound in a neighborhood mainly inhabited by retired Pakistani military personnel not far from the nation's capital, Islamabad.
Nelson said those circumstances lead to "a suspicion of complicity."
Answering questions, Nelson said he believes the release of photos of bin Laden's corpse "probably will be necessary" to bring closure to the event.
The White House said Wednesday it does not plan to release photos of the body.
The death of bin Laden, the mastermind of al-Qaida and architect of the 2001 terrorist attacks on America, means "we're safer, but we're not safe" from terrorism, Nelson said.
In Nelson's letter to Feinstein, he noted that the United States has provided tens of billions of dollars of assistance to Pakistan over the past decade.
"We need to know how much of that aid has been used for counterterrorism and to what effect, as well as how bin Laden's presence could have possibly escaped notice by Pakistani officials," he wrote.
###
Search: Issues, Defense, Foreign Policy, National Security, Law Enforcement, Troops and Veterans, Nelson in the News