nick payton walsh, cnn, abbottabad. >> through the eyes of a child around the bin laden compound in pakistanead, the hunt for bin laden and the role of enhanced interrogations. we examine the renewed debate over waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques and whether they helped uncover the first clues that led to al qaeda's leader. stay with us. right now, all over the country discov customers are gettinfive percent cashback bonus at home improment stores. it pays to switch, it pays to discover. [ airplane engine whines ] [ grunts ] [ dog barking ] gah! [ children shouting ] [ grunts ] [ whacking piñata ] [ whacking piñata, grunting ] sadly, no. oh. but i did pick up your dry cleaning and had your shoes shined. well, i made you a reservation at the sushi place around the corner. well, in that case, i better get back to these invoices... which i'll do right after making your favorite pancakes. you know what? i'm going to tidy up your side of the office. i can't hear you because i'm also making you a smoothie. [ male announcer ] marriott hotels & resorts knows it's better for xe

nick payton walsh is in abbo abbottabad. how are they responding that they dropped the ball? >> reporter: they admit they are embarrassed themselves. what has really god to them is what leon panetta reportedly said in this closed door congressional session, that they were involved or incompetent. one senior pakistani said, this really marks not just a deficit of trust but absolute mistrust between two sides, calling it very regrettable indeed. sounding furious the cia would think that of them. they kn they know how hard we are working to fight this here. they were expounding on the mistrust that this has brought on this relationship. the pakistanis were not informed in advance has permanently da damaged. >> if there is more than one u.s. lawmaker saying we should suspend the funding $3.5 billion to pakistan. how would that affect pakistan shall the situation on the ground? >> reporter: the annual afrm tax was about $19 billion and they have received about $20 billion from the u.s. government. u.s. aid is a huge deal. the real beneficiary, many people say, is the military. the

our nick payton walsh is in it islamabad, pakistan. if i can, if you can, set the scene for me there as news spreads of osama bin laden's death. >> reporter: i think really the first hinge to point out is when news of this broke, pakistani intelligence officials were quick to point out that they were on the ground during the operation by the americans. that was subsequently denied by the americans and then denied by the same pakistani sources. so there was an immediate rush to have seemed to have been involved really in this quite remarkable american operation. which pakistanis are saying in fact actually began undetected. helicopters flu in, got over the compound before pakistani air defenses were aware they had arrived. obviously a 40 minute gunfire ensued. but this was an immediate rush by pakistan to hook like it was on site, to look like this is the result of intelligence sharing. in fact one suggesting phone records had been given by the pakistanis to the americans and it enabled them to find this particular compound. >> and if y

joining me now with a view from pakistan is our correspondent, nick payton walsh. u're in islamabad, have you ever seen this mansion, nick? >> no, i haven't seen this mansion, actually, but i am hearing some very interesting news from a pakistani intelligence official. he has said to me that the way bin laden was tracked down involved intelligence, primarily developed on pakistani information, he said. this basically had to do with electronic and phone tracking. he said this information was regularly passed from the pakistanis to the americans and he said basically, when it comes to this particular mansion, what was happening around there, that he referred to how the pakistanis had dropped the ball. and had slipped off their radar, but the americans had picked up on this particular series of data and begun to analyze it, from september of last year. this seems to focus around an individual who came and left from the compound. we're not clear the nationality or the age or exactly what -- exactly what he was doing there. i'm presuming he would have been used to ferry

cnn's nick payton walsh is in the city of abbottabad. there were u.s. agents living next door. it makes you wonder how they were able to escape detection in the middle of a pakistani neighborhood. >> i think it is pretty obvious that we can get that they must have been pakistani or look very pakistani indeed. you are absolutely right. in order for the kind of observation that this "new york times" article refers to have happened, they would have had to have been 10 or 15 houses that looks straight on to the compound. that compound is pretty isolated, sort of on its own really in a bunch of cabbage fields. there are 10 or 15 houses where they could have been in a farrell close community. we were all on the roofs of many of those houses yesterday looking down. this is a fairly busy town. it is possible, really, that if there were properly trained pakistani assets or the cia working here, being discrete, not suddenly rushing up and renting a room somewhere and leaving a week before the raid, they could have escaped detection quite easily. that is entirely possible. of course, it i