Tora Bora is to Bush as Falafel is to O'Reilly

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

In other words, something they just can't bear to discuss or hear because it points out so patently a personal failure. Tora Bora is the defining moment when Bush took what many sincerely thought was an actual War on Terror and diverted the energies and manpower of the country to Iraq instead. It is when we lost the potential to capture hundreds if not thousands of real live terrorist at one fell swoop.

It deserves to be re-visited often, especially with the Right's new desire to assign blame, although previously they had warned everyone off from "finger-pointing" and the "blame game"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8853000/site/newsweek/

Exclusive: CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away

Mazhar Ali Khan / AP
Cornered? Bin Laden was in Tora Bora, a new book says

Newsweek
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."

This next link is just an amazingly well-done timeline. I'm not at all familiar with the blog, but just found it as I was reading about Tora Bora

http://www.topdog08.com/2004/10/how_bin_laden_g.html

and again a blog I'm not familiar with but I thought this guy had some great commentary about Bin Laden, Tora Bora and Iraq
http://bottleofblog.typepad.com/bottleofblog/2005/09/total_fraud.html

There a few things that the Bush administration would like to discuss LESS than Tora Bora. It's one of the biggest screw-ups on their watch. I think the Path to 9/11 was an extremely conscious effort to manufacture a false history in a very insidious way. There was a guy who almost had Bin Laden - his name was Bush. The malfeasance that was assigned to Clinton in the movie belongs very clearly and specifically to Bush and his gang.

I insist that Chris Wallace have a roundtable discussion with Bush, Rumsfeld, and Franks and talk about the unconnected dots at Tora Bora.

[sam sarrha]

1. i heard a story from a soldier about the Tora Bora assault, he said he was

with the Afghan soldiers ready to go in after the saturation bombing, he said a plane dropped a string of bombs seriously far apart and flew away.. the Afghans looked at him with astonishment and asked.. is that all there is.?? he said there was no real support by the US to attempt any real attack.. there was no support.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. And you do have to ask yourself , why?

2 possibilities:

1.They never wanted to catch him in the first place since he is their poster boy for the WOT

or

2.The same general gross incompetence they have shown in all their endeavors - 9/11, Tora Bora, Katrina, Iraq, etc.