Appearing this week in
Newsweek:

Exclusive: CIA Commander: We Let bin Laden Slip Away

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.”

Berntsen’s book gives, by contrast, a heroic portrayal of CIA activities at
Tora Bora and in the war on terror. Ironically, he has sued the agency over
what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book—a standard process for
ex-agency employees describing classified matters. “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.” Jennifer Millerwise, a CIA spokeswoman,
says Berntsen’s “timeline is not accurate,” adding that he submitted his book
as an ex-employee only in mid-June. “We take seriously our goal of responding
quickly.”

—Michael Hirsh

This administration definitely deserves the award for the most government
employees turned author. The problem for the administration is the vast number
of people who have left to write books that in effect blow the whistle on the
White House.

George Bush always says when in regards to Iraq that he will listen to the
opinion of the troops on the ground. Here is a perfect example of a troop on the
ground, only this time it is a C.I.A. agent, who could of lead us to our most
notorious criminal that cost us 3,000 lives on 9/11.

If you think about this, then you can see why Bush didn’t want Osama caught
at that period in time. It actually served two purposes to let him remain at
large. The first is strictly political. With Osama at large he could continue to
keep fear in Americans until he was able to win re-election. The second reason
is that it would hinder chances of going to war in Iraq.

Bush kept making false ties between Saddam and Osama in our lead up to going
to war in Iraq. If Osama was no longer a threat, then that tie would of been
severed, thereby effectively destroying that reason. Bush needed Osama around
for a couple more years to help with his agenda, and he got it. The sad part is
we sacrificed capturing the monster in order for Bush to save his political
fortunes.

Sadly once this book does get released, it will immediately be coined as
misconceptions portrayed by a disgruntled government employee. That is the same
defense the White House and GOP has taken against other authors such as Richard
Clarke. It is ironic how other books can be released by authors who favor the
right, like “The Truth About Hillary” and “The 100 People Screwing Up America”,
and they do not come under the same fire. The people who write those books are
authors plain and simple. The people writing these books that question the White
House are writing from personal experience which they gained in their
professional lives. That is something to base the merit on.