

The chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee won't talk about what information is coming out of the computers found in Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein doesn't need to know that to ask the central question behind a manhunt that took a decade: did the Pakistanis shelter the leader of al-Qaida?

Feinstein said she has "no information" to that effect. But that doesn't exactly exonerate the Pakistanis, as far as she's concerned. "How [could] this kind of facility, which stood out, close by a military academy, could exist for the length of time that it did exist?" she wondered, when Danger Room asked her during a press conference on Tuesday. "We now know that bin Laden was there for up to six years. That's a substantial period of time."

The anomalies of the compound – its conspicuously high walls, its proximity to the academy, its absence from the communications grid – means "we have to know whether the Pakistanis knew. If they didn't know, why didn't they know?" Feinstein said. "Why didn't they pay more attention to it? Was this just benign indifference, or was this indifference with a motive?"

Pakistani officials continue to "walk both sides of the street," Feinstein said. Accordingly, don't expect the CIA's drone war to diminish or shift in focus, even if drones didn't take out bin Laden.

The drone war, a renewed area of conflict between the U.S. and Pakistan, is the dog that hasn't barked in the bin Laden hunt. The al-Qaida leader is just the latest in top targets who've been killed or captured in major Pakistani cities far from the tribal regions that the CIA batters with Hellfire missiles.

Asked by Danger Room about the drone war post-bin Laden, Feinstein, who "asked that this effort be established," strongly defended the location targeting. "The use of the drones or the Predator by the intelligence community is very carefully done," she said, checked over by committee staff "just to be able to provide a measure of oversight that real care is being taken to avoid collateral or civilian damage." Accordingly, "they've gotten a large number of high value" terrorists through the strikes, which is good enough for her.

Ironically, it was Feinstein who first publicly revealed that Pakistan provided air bases for the drone program – the first public evidence of official Pakistani complicity in the strikes.

Pakistan is acting hurt over allegations that it sheltered bin Laden or yawned at finding him. President Asif Ali Zardari called it "baseless speculation" in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday.

Feinstein stopped short of saying that aid should cut be cut off. But she pointedly called humanitarian assistance "much more important than military assistance" and criticized Pakistan for sheltering the Haqqani network from drone strikes. And her first sight of the Abbottabad compound – provided to her by the CIA in secret in December, she said, though without proof it harbored bin Laden – gave her suspicions about its true purposes.

"The first time I saw a photo of the place, I thought, 'It just well may be'" where a top al-Qaida figure laid his head, "because it's so much bigger and no one approaches it and few people [are] coming and going, the way the walls are, the razor wire." Her committee will host a secret briefing on Wednesday with CIA Director Leon Panetta and Vice Adm. William McRaven, the leader of the Joint Special Operations Command, to determine if they had any indication the Pakistanis found it just as suspicious at first glance.

*Photo: Sohaib Athar, taken outside bin Laden's compound *

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