"Isn't it time we had the truth? Yes or no, did Osama Bin
Laden escape from Tora Bora in 2001?" -- John Kerry, Daily Kos,
January 20, 2005
John Kerry, the world famous Francophiliac junior senator from
Massachusetts, now begins blogging at the cozy Dem cave of Daily
Kos with the same high dudgeon of his late campaign.
It is strangely nostalgiac to hear John Kerry's rightous tone
sound exactly the same today as it did the last time he was on the
stump, November 2, 2004. It feels fourteen months as if it is
fourteen minutes, because he launches into the podium pounding mode
about Osama Bin Laden, Tora Bora, what Bush didn't do, war on
terror, yes or no, war, war, bring it on, me, Bush, me.
The Kerry charge, from the last weeks of the campaign, as I best
recall it, since it seems like last year's runner up movie for the
Golden Globes, is that George Bush ran down and trapped the scared,
hallucinatory, mass-murdering OBL in the perilous landscape of the
Tora Bora mountains in November and December, 2001, and then,
because George Bush is a wimpy, stupid, slab-sided, Cheney-creepy
commander in chief, George Bush let OBL get away.
Kerry never explained why George Bush would let OBL get away --
why George Bush would order the US to war within moments of the
9-11 attack, sending waves of aircraft at Kabul and Kandahar and
anything else with a profile in Afghanistan, reducing the Taliban
to snarling dust, and then, at the last moment, with the bad guy
backed into a box canyon ten thousand feet high, would decide, nah,
I'm soft-minded, let's break off. Kerry just accused: George Bush
refused to pull the trigger! Why? That was left to our
imaginations.
Yet in the heated last moments of the campaign, Kerry's charge
made enough sense to the blue team to rally the polling and show
momentum in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, and other states Team
Kerry needed to win.
My memory is that this sound bite of huff-and-I'll-puff
electioneering was doing well at the blue watering hole until,
deus ex machina, OBL popped up on a video, the weekend
before election day, chanting much the same rubbishy
we'll-forgve-you-if-you-forgive-yourself stuff, and Kerry got
caught on camera treating OBL as an irritant, or a dirty trick, or
a talking head trying to steal his TV time, and the electorate
realized, what are we thinking? John Kerry is all talk, no
shoot.
Now we are are fourteen months on, and Kerry is back to the
future as a Francophiliac junior senator from Massachusetts, and
yet he still wants to know why George Bush is such a dope to let
OBL get away.
Facts are sturdy. I report what I have learned from Gary
Berntsen, retired CIA officer, who was Jawbreaker, the man chaged
with tracking down and killing OBL at Tora Bora from November to
mid-December, 2001.
OBL did retreat with several hundred woozy loyalists into the
woeful mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; OBL did
prepare an ambush for any forces that pushed up, Russian style, to
get him in those valleys. And the CIA did send spotter teams up to
the peaks to use laser identifiers to target the Taliban and Al Q
death squads. And we did drop a BLU-82 on the site where we had
good intelligence, including voice-identifying, that OBL was
hiding; and then we sent in waves of bombers with 500 pound bombs.
The valley was shredded, pulverized, reorganized.
What didn't happen was that Gary Berntsen requested a U.S. Army
Ranger Battalion to finish the job on the ground, and he didn't get
it. Gary does not know who turned off the request, sometime between
December 4 and when he was pulled out, December 15. Gary is certain
it was not Tennett, or Pavitt, or Rumsfeld, or Powell, or even
Franks at CENTCOM. The troops may have worked, may not: it's still
worth debating. Instead the decision was made to let our so-called
Afghan allies do the job, and some of them sold their services to
OBL and walked him out to Pakistan.
What is true is that George Bush ordered CENTCOM and the CIA to
assault and take a country of gangsters and jihadists: and it took
about 100 CIA officers and contractors, with the support of various
Afghan warlords, about 60 days to clean the country of the bad
guys. OBL got out because he paid for a guide and then walked into
the control of the same Pushtun clans that he supported during the
Soviet invasion of the 1980s.
Al Q high command has not moved much since December 2001. The
CIA missile strike on January 13, 2005, killed, according to still
confirming reports, four of the major Al Q leaders who were likely
at Tora Bora, or near to, in December 2001. The missile strike
missed bumpy headed Ayman al-Zawahiri, but he hasn't run far.
Would a major ground assault get the job done today? Gary
Berntsen believes the risks are great. Also complicating the story
now is that Pakistan is unstable and that Iran is now the main
enemy. The U.S. does not want to alienate Pakistan as it builds
support to go up against scared, hallucinatory, mass-murdering
Iran.
To return to John Kerry's frozen question: "Isn't it time
we had the truth? Yes or no, did Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora
Bora in 2001?"
The answer is that intelligence is good that OBL was at Tora
Bora in November - December 2001,and that he is still there, or has
been, ever since. And that the Bush Administration still wants him
dead, which is why the President took the risk of approving the
missile strike of January 13, to strip away more of OBL's prayer
group.
Now, John Kerry, if you were president today, would you have
taken that Januay 13 shot and risked losing Pakistan? Would you
take the next shot, when it comes? Yes or no? And by shot, I mean,
using a platform to kill human beings, many of them collateral to
the target, including one scared, hallucinatory, mass-murdering
tall man.
I am not certain you would take the shot, John Kerry, which is
likely the reason you are not president -- because you did not
convince a majority of voters that you are a shooter as well as
Francophiliac junior senator from Massachusetts.
topics:
Iran, Russia, Pakistan, NATO
