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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton continued her diplomacy in Pakistan and offered sitdowns with the traveling press corps. NBC and ABC took her up on her offer; CBS skipped the q-&-a. ABC's Jim Sciutto addressed the Secretary's newsmaking accusation from Thursday, in which she said: "al-Qaeda has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002 and I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and could not get them if they really wanted to." Sciutto did not repeat the quote. He did ask: "Do you believe the Pakistani government is in effect harboring terrorists." Madame Secretary backtracked: "I do not think that they are. I think that they have gone after the enemies who most directly threaten them."
Both ABC's Sciutto and NBC's Andrea Mitchell were struck by the vitriol that Rodham Clinton encountered. At a university symposium "you came across a wall of resistance and suspicion, low grade anger. They challenged you," noted Mitchell. "That audience was silent. There was no applause." ABC's Sciutto put it this way: "You have heard animosity here. You have heard real doubts about America's intentions. You heard conspiracy theories." Madame Secretary saw the bright side. "I want, at least, people to go away saying: 'Well, no American official has ever come and listened to us like that,'" she told ABC. "They understand that, if we are talking about the kind of partnership that I believe we should be, that is not just a one-way street," was her line on NBC.
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