U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away
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.
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.”
Berntsen is on Chris Matthews “Hardball” on MSNBC, tonight [Wednesday]. I’ll have to watch and listen to how credible he sounds.
Posted: Wed - December 28, 2005 at 01:22 PM