Nightly News   |  May 08, 2011

An expert's take on intel gathered at compound

NBC's Lester Holt asks NBC News' terrorism analyst Roger Cressey if officials are worried the huge cache of intelligence found at Osama bin Laden's Abbotobad, Pakistan compound will soon go stale.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>> for more on all this, we're joined by nbc news terrorism analyst roger cressey . we're told that the u.s. is already sharing some of the intel from bin laden 's hideout with other countries. are officials essentially racing against the clock for fear some of this material is going to get dated or stale quickly?

>> i think that's right, lester. what we have here is we have actionable threat information. and that by sharing it with our allies, they may be able to take information they already have in their possession, piece together what we discovered in bin laden 's compound and learn about potential plots. it's putting the pieces of the puzzle together. there is a bit of a race against time involved here.

>> the official u.s. narrative is that he was still somehow in charge of this operation, this al qaeda operation. and drawing up plans for attacks. but yet nothing major has happened. no follow-up attack to 9/11. was he discovering that his network was unraveling?

>> well, lester, we've had tremendous success over the past ten year. we have pounded al qaeda relentlessly in pakistan and elsewhere. that's one of the main reasons why they've not been able to duplicate their 9/11 success inside the united states . but what this ndemonstrates with the information we found and bin laden 's operational role is that the threat is still very real and we need to be equally relentless.