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No apology for violating Pak air space: White House

May 04, 2011 08:38 am | Updated December 04, 2021 11:06 pm IST - Washington

"He was enemy number one for this country and killed many, many innocent civilians," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said

A satellite image of the compound, center, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden lived. U.S. forces stormed the compound in two helicopters. File photo

U.S. would not make any apology for its unilateral military action against al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan, the White House has said.

“We make no apologies about that,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said when asked that U.S. should not have gone unilaterally inside Pakistan to get bin Laden. “He was enemy number one for this country and killed many, many innocent civilians. And no apologies,” Mr. Carney said.

On Tuesday, Pakistan termed the U.S. commando operation in Abbottabad that killed Laden an “unauthorised, unilateral action”.

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Mr. Carney claimed otherwise. “It has been our cooperation with Muslims in Pakistan and other countries, as well as Muslim Americans, which has helped in our overall effort to fight al Qaeda and protect Americans, to protect this country,” he said.

“It doesn’t change the fact the President’s very strongly held conviction and expressed conviction that this has never been about Islam, because, in fact, Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer who killed many Muslims,” he said.

Mr. Carney said bin Laden was a relic of the past, in many ways. “The kind of yearning for individual freedoms that we’ve seen protest on the streets of the Arab world in these past few months represent a movement that is in the polar opposite direction that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda wanted to take the Arab world,” he said.

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“I think that that’s an important point to make and to observe because he’s in many ways, the symbol of everything that those folks who have been demonstrating on the ground for their voices, for their rights, for their individual aspirations, he’s a representation of everything they don’t want,” he said.

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