We had Bin Laden But…
28 December 2005 3:48 pm by Taylor Marsh
We had Bin Laden But…
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| CIA AGENT IN CHARGE: We had bin Laden at Tora Bora. |
“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.” CIA
Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away
If George and his Dick hated the CIA before, today is only going
to harden that hatred.
In honor of Bob Woodward, the presidential patsy of the year,
I typed as fast as I could, with a lot of help from my tivo, in getting down
part of a “Hardball” interview about what really happened at Tora
Bora when bin Laden got away.
As longtime readers know, I have been all over the Tora Bora –
bin Laden got loose issue, since it all began. But today, this interview was
too important to wait for a full transcript. So, below is as accurate a version
I could get. Besides, Woodward was busy, so this will have to do until I can
provide the transcript when it's available.
General Tommy Franks, who was not on the ground, but at CENTCOM,
said in 2004 that “Mr. bin Laden was never within our grasp.”
The CIA man in charge of the mission, who was actually on the
ground at Tora Bora, adamantly disagrees with Franks' view.
This is some of what Gary Berntsen, the CIA field officer in
charge on the ground at Tora Bora, said today.
Gary Berntsen: “We had locations on (bin Laden).
We had human source reporting, which had proved reliable throughout the war
and that is why we won the war so rapidly. We had picked up a radio off of
a dead al Qaeda member and were listening to bin Laden pray to his people,
apologize to his people for bringing them in there. I had CIA's top Arabic
linguist with me who had listened to bin Laden's voice for 4 years. We threw
up a 15,000 pound 'blue 82' at him, and then we had B52s conduct strikes on
the same areas where we knew he was. He was willing to constantly sacrifice
the lives of young Muslims to save his own skin.”O’Donnell: “You have said, “I
knew exactly where he was–”Gary Berntsen: “Yes, we did know exactly–
O’Donnell: “So why didn't you and
his team go get 'em?”Gary Berntsen: ” Well, of course there was quite
a bit of fighting going on. We had about 2,000 Afghan allies that were the
eastern alliance, that was created. There were gunfights, gun battles. We
were trying, we moved up the mountains with these Afghans. The Afghans were
less than reliable and this is why I was calling for ground forces. I called
for, you know, 6-800 Rangers to be inserted in there and had 600-800 Rangers
been inserted we probably would have ended the thing.”O’Donnell: “So you called for back-up
and you didn't get it?Gary Berntsen: “Well, the point was that that wasn't
my call. I got, I made the request in the first 2 or 3 days of December. We
initiated that operation, we inserted our team in late November into Jalalabad…
The problem is this, when you're fighting terrorists, success for the terrorists
is not defeating us on the battlefield, it's escaping. And I was trying to
make sure that we eliminated every single one of them. And in that case we
didn't. We killed quite a large number of bin Laden's force. We killed 75%
of the people there. … You may recall that 130 of them were captured by
the Pakistanis on the back side of Tora Bora, but bin Laden and his element
were able to escape.”
Berntsen also spoke the military's praise, saying they “fought like lions.”
But he also said that “Tora Bora was a very, very difficult place to access.
It was an area that was far away. It was high. It was cold.”
Bentsen admits how risky putting Rangers in would have been, because there
would have been significant casualites.
And remember, there weren't very many “blue 82″ bombs, huge bunker busters,
and Bentsen called one of the few in at Tora Bora. As he said, they weren't targeting a 7-11.
Gary Berntsen said, when O’Donnell asked, that he is a Republican and
a loyal supporter of the president.
