our work. and in return, as we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we commit to you that we will continue to do everything in our power to fulfill your mission of defeating al qaeda and their militant allies. we will do whatever it takes to protect this country and to keep it safe. this has been a long and tough fight, and it's not over. but as we have just proven, it's a fight that we're going to win for you, mr. president, and for the american people. ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honor to introduce the president of the united states. >> thank you. thank you very much. thank you, all. thank you. thank you so much. thank you very much, everybody. thank you. well, thank you, leon, and thank you, jim. when i chose leon panetta as director of the cia, i said he was going to be a strong advocate for this agency and would strengthen your capabilities to meet the threats of our time. when i chose jim clapper as director of national intelligence, i charged him with making sure that our intelligence community works as one integrated team. that's exactly what these two leaders have done along with all of you. so, jim, and leon, thank you for your remarkable leadership, not just in recent weeks, but during the entirety of your tenure. you have done a great job. [ applause ] this is my third visit here to langley as president, and each of these visits has marked another milestone in our mission to protect the american people and keep our country safe. on my first visit just months after taking office, i stood here and i said that this agency and our entire intelligence community is fundamental to america's national security. i said that i believed that your best days were still to come. and i pledged that you would have my full support to carry out your critical work. soon after that visit, i called leon into the oval office and i directed him to make the killing or capture of osama bin laden the top priority in our war to defeat al qaeda. and he came back here and you guys, who had already been working so hard on this issue, redoubled your efforts and that was true all across the intelligence community. my second visit, a year later, came under more somber circumstances. we gathered to pay tribute to seven american patriots who gave their lives in this fight at a remote post in afghanistan. it's already been mentioned, their stars now on this memorial wall. through our grief and our tears, we resolved that their sacrifice would be our summons to carry on their work, to complete this mission, to win this war. today i've returned just to say thank you. on behalf of all americans and people around the world, because you carried on. you stayed focused on your mission. you honored memory of your fallen colleagues. and in helping to locate and take down osama bin laden, you made it possible for us to achieve the most significant victory yet in our war to defeat al qaeda. i just met with some of the outstanding leaders and teams from across the community who worked so long and so hard to make that raid a success. and i'm pleased, today, that we're joined by representatives from all of our intelligence agencies and that folks are watching this live back at all of those agencies because this truly was a team effort. that's not always the case in washington. but all of you worked together every single day. this is one of the few times when all these leaders and organizations have the occasion to appear together publicly. so i thank all of you for coming. because i think it's so important for the american people to see all of you here today. part of the challenge of intelligence work is by necessity, your work has to remain secret. i know that carries a heavy burden. you're often the first ones to get the blame when things go wrong. and you're always the last ones to get the credit when things go right. so when things do go right, and they do more often than the world will ever know, we ought to celebrate wyour success. that's why i came here. i wanted every single one of you to know, whether you work at the cia or across the community, at every step of our effort to take out bin laden, the work you did and the quality of the intelligence that you provided may the critical difference. to me, to our team on those helicopters. to our nation. after i directed that getting bin laden be the priority, you hunkered down even more. building on years of painstaking work. pulling together in some cases the slenderest of intelligence streams. running those threads to ground until you found that courier and you tracked him to that compound. and when i was briefed last summer, you had built the strongest intelligence case against, in terms of where bin laden was, since tora bora. in the months that followed, including all those meetings in the situation room, we did what sound intelligence demands. we pushed for more collection. we pushed for more evidence. we questioned our assumptions. you strengthened your analysis. you didn't bite your tongue and try to spin the ball. but you gave it to me straight each and every time. and we did something really remarkable in washington, we kept it a secret. that's how it should be. [ applause ] of course, when the time came to actually make the decision, we didn't know for sure that bin laden was there. the evidence was circumstantial. and the risks, especially to the lives of our special operations forces, were huge. and i knew that the consequences of failure could be enormous. but i made the decision that i did because i had absolute confidence in the skill of our military personnel and i had confidence in you. i put my bet on you. and now the whole world knows that that faith in you was justified. so just as impressive as what you did was how you did it. it was a tribute to your perseverance. your relentless focus and determination over many years. from the fight against al qaeda did not begin on 9/11. among you are veterans who have been pursuing these murderers for many years, even before they attacked our embassies in africa and struck the "cole" in yemen. 9/11 was a call to service. this fight has defined your generation. and on this wall are stars honoring all your colleagues and friends. more than a dozen who have given their lives in the fight against al qaeda and its violent allies. as the years wore on, others began to think that this terrorist might never be brought to justice, but you never quit. you never gave up. you pulled together across this agency and across the community. no one piece of information and no one agency made this possible. you did it together. cia, national security agency, national reconnaissance office. the national geospatial intelligence agency. everyone at the national center. folks across the government, civilian and military, so many of you here today. that's exactly how our intelligence community is supposed to work. using every capability, human, technical, collecting, analyzing, sharing, integrating intelligence and then acting on it. that's what made this one of the greatest intelligence successes in american history. and that's why intelligence professionals are going to study and be inspired by your achievement for generations to come. now, make no mistake, this is not over. because we not only took out the symbol and operational leader of al qaeda, we walked off with his files, the largest treasure-trove of intelligence ever seized from a terrorist leader. many of you now are working around the clock. you didn't have much time to celebrate. we have to analyze, evaluate and exploit this mountain of intelligence. so today every terrorist in the al qaeda network should be watching their back because we're going to review every video, we're going to examine every photo, we're going to read every one of those millions of pages. we're going to pursue every lead. we are going to go wherever it takes us. we're going to finish the job. we're going to defeat al qaeda. even as we stay focused on this mission, we need you to stay nimble and flexible to meet the full range of threats to our security. from plots against our homeland, to nations seeking weapons of mass destruction, to transnational threats such as cyber criminals and narco traffickers. i'm going to keep relying on you. for your intelligence, the analysis that comes across my desk every single day. and 300-plus americans are counting on you to stay a step ahead of our adversaries and to keep our country safe. i have never been more proud or more confident in you than i am today. not just because this extraordinary success, but because it reminds us of who we are as a people and as a nation. you reminded us that when we americans set our mind to something, when we are focused and when we are working together and not worried about who's getting the credit, when we stay true to our values, even if it takes years, there's nothing we cannot do. that's why i still believe in what i said my first visit here two years ago. your greatest days are still to come. and if any of you doubt what this means, i wish i could have taken some of you on the trip i made to new york city where we laid a wreath at ground zero and i had a chance to meet firefighters who had lost an entire shift. police officers who had lost their comrades. a young woman, 14 years old, who had written to me because her last memory of her father was talking to him on the phone while her mother wept beside her watch before th right before they watched the tower go down. she and other members, families of 9/11 victims talked about what this meant. it meant that their suffering had not been forgotten. and that the american community stands with them. that we stand with each other. so most of you will never get headlines for the work that you do. you won't get ticker tape parades. but as you go about your work with incredible diligence and dedication every single day, i hope all of you understand how important it is. how grateful i am. and that you have the thanks of a grateful nation. god bless you and god bless the united states of america. thank you. >> the president of the united states giving a thank you, a shout-out there, if you will, to the cia there in langley. the employees there. you see the back of their heads. you don't see a lot of their faces quite frankly because they do what they do in secret. they don't get a lot of attention and don't want the attention. they do their jobs in secret and it's necessary for them to do so. the president telling them this was truly a team effort, speaking about the success in getting osama bin laden in that raid a couple of weeks ago. also said, talking about the risk in that raid saying, yes, we put together a case, one of the strongest cases we've had in years since tora bora about where bin laden was but he said we did not know for sure and there were risks associated with this, but saying that the whole world now knows that his faith in the intelligence community was, in fact, justified. also reiterating that this is not over. as we keep this picture up of the president shaking hands there at the cia. i want to bring in someone who was among those folks there at the cia at one time. mike baker, formally of the cia and also a former covert operations officer. he's with us here now. good to see you as always. and we hear the president talk about, and kind of applauded, it's hard to keep a secret in washington has they were putting together the information and putting the plan together to get bin laden. they kept a secret. would you prefer if the secret continued? because we are getting so much information that continues to come out. we've heard leon panetta, we've heard the chairman of the joint chiefs, the defense secretary said the deal was, we weren't supposed to talk after this operation. so much is out now. is it disturbing to you so much is still coming out and we're still talking about it? >> you raise a very good point. it is disturbing, it's disturbing to anybody who's worked in the intelligence world. it's puzzling to some degree why there is this constant sort of dribs and drabs of information. and you're right. i mean, and the president raised a good point which is one of the amazing things about this was the fact that from that summer of 2010, until the operation took place, they were able to keep a lid on it. and that's not an easy thing. and, you know, it should be recognized as pretty amazing in this day and time. but right afterwards, as secretary gates pointed out, you know, in the situation room, they thought they had an agreement that they would just zip it basically. and no one would be opening their yap. and as secretary gates said, that appeared to fall apart the very next day after the operation. and we started getting these multiple versions of what was happening. and then strangely enough, oddly enough, there was this, you know, this sudden talk about the intel trove. and frankly, that's one of the more disturbing parts. there's no need to talk about what was hoovered up in that compound. we should have just gotten busy, as the professionals did, and are doing, analyzing and exploiting, get the actionable intelligence out to the field. there was no need to know on the part of the public about what we picked up in that compound. >> is this kind of how just you are built in the intelligence community, cia in particular? it's nice for the boss to come by and say, thank you for your work. are you all kind of built, you can take it or leave it, you know how to do your jobs and you know you're not going to get glory? >> well, you know, i mean, it's -- it would be disingenuous to say -- everybody appreciates a pat on the back on occasion. and it's important, i think, and it was important for the president. i mean, he went and he thanked the team members, the s.e.a.l. team members. that was incredibly important. the teams couldn't have gotten to the compound without the seven or eight years of incredibly painstaking and hard work done by the cia and other members of the intel community. now, to your point, you know, the agency is, you know, they're used to operating off the radar screen. they understand that, you know, and they don't do their job to get their pats on the back. they understand that they're going to be off the radar screen and what they do goes unnoticed, unrecognized. that's the way it should be for the most part. >> let me bring in something else here we're getting from department of homeland security. we just got word some of that information, and the president said it was one of the largest or was the largest collection of information ever taken from a terrorist leader, all that information that came out of the bin laden compound. apparently from that the homeland security department put out some warnings to local police departments, warning them about al qaeda possibly wanting to target oil tankers and commercial oil infrastructure at sea. saying this is part of their continuing interest, is what the statement said. tell me what you make of that and also tell me, can we expect to see more of those types of warnings as they continue to go through this treasure-trove of information? >> yes, i think we will. to your latter point, i think we will continue to see these pieces of information come out. i mean, one of the first things they do when they're scouring all this information that we've been talking about is they're looking for the imminent threats. it's like if you were to pick up somebody off the battlefield or you've immediately captured a, you know, a high-value target. one of the first things you're looking for, do they have any information about an imminent threat or an operation in the final planning stages? so they're looking at that. we have a process in place where you take the information that relates to homeland security and possible threats and it gets fed to the local and the state and the federal authorities and then the decision is made. does it get out to the public? is it specific enough to warrant dissemination to the public? what we're seeing is kind of a halfway step. we're seeing, again, because there's this bizarre, you know, desire to get some of the information out about what we've been picking up out of the compound, the idea that they're looking at oil tankers or, you know, shipping lanes, not a big surprise. we've known that. just as we knew previously last week when they were talking about trains being a possible target. so, you know, for al qaeda and for the like-minded minions, it's been business as usual. we know they're always looking at possible targets. they're, you know, typical. they're looking for soft targets. we have to game against all of those. we have to plan for those various scenarios. >> mike baker, always good to chat with you and get your perspective and expertise. we appreciate it. you enjoy your weekend. >> appreciate it. you, too, thank you. earlier, the president hosted benjamin netanyahu. the two men were sitting side by side in the same room a day after the two traded barbs from afar. our ed henry is at the white house for us to tell us how this meeting all went down. also, another developing story we're following. dominique strauss-kahn could be on the move any time now waiting for his release from rikers, but there was a hitch. will he really be allowed to get out of jail any time soon? the latest on that. stay with me. building up our wireless network all across america. we're adding new cell sites... increasing network capacity, and investing billions of dollars to improve your wireless network experience. from a single phone call to the most advanced data download, we're covering more people in more places than ever before in an effort to give you the best network possible. at&t. rethink possible. an accident doesn't have to slow you down. introducing better car replacement, available only from liberty mutual insurance. if your car is totaled, we give you the money to buy a car that's one model year newer, with 15,000 fewer miles on it. there's no other auto insurance product like 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