Just two weeks before the presidential election, and nearly three years after the debacle itself, the president addressed the failure to capture Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001.
“Now my opponent [John Kerry] is throwing out the wild claim that he knows where bin Laden was in the fall of 2001 — and that our military had a chance to get him in Tora Bora. This is an unjustified and harsh criticism of our military commanders in the field. This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
Even at the time, this didn’t make a lot of sense. Far from being a “wild claim,” the Bush administration itself came to the same conclusion Kerry did — two years beforehand.
In fact, in hindsight, everything about Bush’s charge was either blatant dishonesty or stunning incompetence. The president said Kerry was wrong because we didn’t know if bin Laden was really there at the time. The truth, as usual, turns out to be quite different from Bush’s rhetoric.
[I]n 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.
So, where’s Berntsen’s book, documenting his claims? The CIA is sitting on it, delaying its publication.
“They’re just holding the book,” which is scheduled for October release, he says. “CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. The CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book.”
And as long as we’re talking about Kerry being right and Bush being wrong, it’s worth noting that Kerry’s criticism of the events at Tora Bora weren’t just campaign palaver. Kerry didn’t wait until the fall of 2004 to start complaining; he was one of a very small number of people highlighting the debacle when it happened.
I honestly don’t know why this never became a major political embarrassment for the president. Kerry brought it up frequently, but it never gained traction with reporters covering the 2004 campaign.
Indeed, the day after the first Bush-Kerry debate, The Note reported on a focus group in Columbus, Ohio, run by ABC News’ Kate Snow, that watched the event. One undecided voter said he was intrigued by Kerry’s Tora Bora argument. The Note reported at the time:
[The voter] was dismayed that Bush never dismissed that and he wants to know: did the US let Bin Laden to slip out?
That’s exactly what we did — and the typical American voter had no idea.