Exclusive: CIA Commander: We Let bin Laden Slip Away - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

Exclusive: CIA Commander: We Let bin Laden Slip Away - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com:

"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."