| Aug. 15, 2005 issue - During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was." In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops." |
True enough, this is just one man's account. Given that that man is the field commander on the ground at Tora Bora, however, its an account we all need pay attention to. Short version? According to the man in charge of the operation, everything Kerry said about Tora Bora during the fall was the truth, and everything Bush said was a lie. As with every other revelation that's come in the past 6 months, I doubt if it will have much of an effect.
Ah, but then again... Bush's poll numbers continue to fall, and are now at or near the psychologically critical 40% mark. More important, perhaps, is the fact that his marks for honesty have now fallen below the 50% threshold in the most recent CNN poll. What with the mounting interest in Plame, the ongoing investigations into Tom DeLay, the Ohio conigate scandal, well.... this could be a long, LONG year for the GOP.
Given all that, is it any surprise that we're now hearing talk of a Fall 2006 withdrawal from Iraq, timed perfectly to coincide with the midterm elections? True, I'm personally in favor of a withdrawal when and if the situation on the ground allows it. But good god - timing it with the midterms? This is the party that is supposedly more trustworthy with national security issues? You've got to be kidding me.
But here's a prediction: if Bush's poll numbers continue to head south, a ploy like this has a good chance of backfiring. Once you've lost the trust of the people, they're much more likely to assume the worst about your actions. If things in Iraq continue to deteriorate, I have a hard time imagining people will see a fall withdrawal as anything but political. And that could be disastrous for the GOP. Only time will tell, of course...
--------
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: "WE LET BIN LADEN SLIP AWAY".
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.alexwhalen.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2164
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Leave a comment