Kerry Was Right: Ex-CIA Agent Says US Missed bin Laden in Afghanistan

[kerrygoddess]

Kerry Was Right: Ex-CIA Agent Says US Missed bin Laden in Afghanistan
January 4th, 2006

During the 2004 presidential campaign, and recently on Imus in the Morning, John Kerry has contended that senior US commanders failed to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora because of an over-reliance on unreliable Afghan warlords and he “accused the Bush administration of allowing the al-Qaeda leader to escape by not sending American troops to the battlefield.”

At the time, retired general Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command who ran the Afghan campaign, denied that the military knew of Mr bin Laden’s presence and accused Mr Kerry of relying on “distortions of history.”

“We do not know to this day whether Mr bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Gen Franks wrote in the New York Times during the presidential race. “Tora Bora was teeming with Taliban and Qaeda operatives, many of whom were killed or captured, but Mr bin Laden was never within our grasp.”

One former CIA agent, Gary Berntsen, disputes this account from General Franks in a his new book “Jawbreaker“. He says he “told senior commanders of Mr bin Laden’s presence and arguing that Afghan allies who had militia fighters in the region allowed Mr bin Laden to escape with about 200 Saudi and Yemeni fighters into Pakistan.”

MORE & LINKS - http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=1547

[Klimmer]

1. I'm up late tonight and here is my take on it . . .

The BCF Admin./Neocons don't want Osama bin Laden---their former CIA operative---captured. Perhaps he still is a CIA operative? There are different levels within federal agencies, such as the CIA. You have good CIA, and you have bad CIA.

He is the bogeyman that can be used at any moment to frighten the masses. I'm definitely in the camp of Michael Ruppert on this one. I recommend a good reading of "Crossing the Rubicon." Al Queda is an invention of Al CIAda. See the movie "Syriana"; the movie is right on the mark.

Chaos in the Middle East is to the BCF's/Neocon's benefit. It keeps them in the game that they wouldn't be privy to otherwise. They want to be the middleman. It is all about $$$$$. It is their cash cow. I thought "Syriana" explained this well. Great thinking man's movie. I recommend it if you haven't seen it.

John Kerry is brilliant. However, he can not just come out and say what is exactly on his mind, nor should he. That is not how you bust criminals. But don't you think that the Senator who investigated BCCI, Iran/Contra/CIA/Drug Running Cartel, who called them "criminals" on an off-mike pre-election moment really knows? Absolutely he knows in his gut. I think we all do. He knows the election was stolen. CIA has been involved in international election fraud for a long, long time; it's child's play to them. Election fraud is not beyond the BCF/Neocon's, in-fact it is just a starting point.

The truth of the BCF/Neocon's is unbelievably dark and sinister. I don't believe at the moment we live in a Democracy. Our Democracy truly has gone "underground". There is so much corruption in this administration it is rotting from the inside, and all we can hope at this moment is it will just implode on it's self. But it won't happen unless we keep telling the truth and fighting. Keep up the good work!

People are slowly, ever slowly waking-up. However, I would rather hope they would take a heavy dose of political caffeine to expedite this process, and stop deluding themselves. What will it take to completely wake-up the masses? There have been so many high crimes and misdemeanors by this administration it boggles the mind. What will it take? What will it take?

Keep fighting JK.

NGU

P.S. As dismal as it all seems at times, I hope everyone had peace and joy over the Holidays! I did. Climbing, skiing, paragliding, spending quality time with family, and then finding some very interesting minerals while rockhounding with my children was all good and fun. Had a wonderful time.

[MH1]

2. Another book about CIA in Afghanistan

"First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan" by Gary Schroen.

excerpt from a review posted on Amazon -

(snip)

His particular bête noire is the Defense Department, which he excoriates as ponderous and timid. JAWBREAKER's men raged at the delays in the arrival of Special Operations forces, and when U.S. bombing finally began on Oct. 7, a disgusted Schroen warned Hank that the first forays "could best be described as modest." Schroen reports that the Pentagon got repeatedly rebuked back in Washington for its sluggish pace, including what seems to have been a cabinet-level spanking for Rumsfeld on Oct. 15. But he also takes swipes at clueless stateside officials from his own agency, snarling over a secure phone that one CIA scold "might like the job out here" instead.

Schroen is also still fuming at the policymakers who flung his team into harm's way before the Bush administration was willing "to fight a winning war in Afghanistan." In particular, he holds a grudge against the State Department, Pentagon and NSC officials who hesitated to aid the Northern Alliance before Sept. 11 and continued dithering afterward. According to Schroen, they worried that providing the concentrated, northern-front bombardment necessary to help the alliance defeat the Taliban would also let its Tajik leaders take over Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, and start settling scores with the country's more numerous ethnic Pashtuns. The alliance's leaders felt the mistrust keenly, and so did their JAWBREAKER patron. Schroen came to bitterly resent the "strong anti-Tajik lobby within the ranks of senior U.S. policymakers," including Gen. Tommy Franks of the Joint Chiefs and a State Department official whose name Schroen does not provide but whose resumé is spelled out with venomous precision. Ultimately, events on the ground made U.S. policymakers' decisions for them; as the war cabinet debated, one alliance general told his CIA liaison, "I am going into Kabul regardless of what your NSC decides."

Schroen's hard feelings were probably exacerbated by at least two spectacular episodes in which "friendly fire" almost killed some of his men. On Oct. 10, he got an urgent call from a military officer back home supervising the flights of remotely piloted Predator drones -- the high-tech tool that, in the fall of 2000, had spotted a "man in white" widely thought to be bin Laden before being grounded until after Sept. 11 as Bush administration policymakers argued about whether to delay reconnaissance-only missions until armed planes were readied. The mission manager now reported that a Predator was currently looking in real time at two non-Afghan men in Western garb on a newly built airfield on the Shomali Plains. "One of the men is very tall and thin and may be bin Laden himself," the voice on the line reported, asking permission to launch an anti-tank missile at them. "You're not going to believe this," Schroen told a comrade after checking the coordinates, "but I think the Predator is looking at Chris and Ed, and this guy thinks Ed is bin Laden. They want to hit them with a Hellfire." The other CIA man yelped, "My God, they're going to kill Chris and Ed!" Later, an equally confused B-52 bomber crew dropped a 2,000-pound bomb not on the coordinates of a Taliban troop position but on those of the CIA team nearby; one of Schroen's men was blown to the floor of a mud building, bruised, scared and scraped -- along with the Afghan leader he was briefing, future president Hamid Karzai.

The author is relatively laconic about battlefield blunders, but he is far less forgiving about what he sees as a massive strategic error: the Bush administration's shift of its focus to Iraq at the expense of the country he helped liberate from the Taliban. The only way to get bin Laden's head on that pike, Schroen warns, is to win full cooperation from Pakistan's balky military, beef up the CIA presence in the region, bring back the indispensable Special Operations units that had been pulled out "as early as March 2002" to prepare for the Iraq invasion, and launch a relentless, coordinated manhunt on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. This is deeply informed advice, ignored at American civilians' peril.

(snip)

I picked up a copy of this book but so far haven't had time to read it. Thought it might be of interest to folks though. Schroen was on talk shows about his book when it was released, and iirc he also supported what Kerry said about Tora Bora. There's probably a bunch of blog posts from around that time that report and discuss Schroen's comments.

[karynnj]

3. It was bitter sweet when the Schroen book was about to come out

and he was on MTP. They played a 2004 clip of Kerry in his barn coat saying (as he said a million times) that BL slipped away because we outsourced the effort at Tora Bora to Afghan war lords who weeks before were allied with the Taliban.

(another strong concise Kerry sound bite) I really don't understand how these things were forgotten just because the media has repeatedly told us things that were not true. I am really sick of hearing that Kerry is mealy mouthed, too wordy etc.

[jillan]

4. I happened to catch Bernsten on O'really

Don't flame me...was flipping thru the channels and saw him on. After watching him on CNN previously, I wanted to see the difference.

And there was. He, along with Billy's help, made it sound like there was nothing more that could have been done. Bernstsen asked for more help, couldn't get it. So they did all they could. Killed alot of Al Queda, yeah yeah. And they just love bsh.

However, on CNN, Bernsten made it sound like if only we had more help, which he was begging for. His message there was 'could have, should have'.

Think we have another media whore on our hands.