Letting bin Laden Slip Away

Philadelphia Daily News | 03/09/2006 | Michael Smerconish | BIN LADEN: HOW CLOSE HAVE WE COME?

A rather damning indictment on the Bush admin's execution of the Afghan war here. There's already been a good deal of ink spilled over the miss at Tora Bora, but now the folks who had bin Laden in their sites are starting to talk. Gary Berntsen seems to be the first ...

Four of them found bin Laden, and our best opportunity since 9/11 to kill him.

"They were able to visually spot his camp at Milawa... And from that... mountaintop, they are able to call in air strikes for 56 hours. There were hundreds of them there... We are able to hear bin Laden. After we took a radio off of a dead fighter, we could hear him. We were very close."

That's when Berntsen called for a Blue 82, a 15,000-pound bomb, the largest explosive in our inventory shy of a nuclear weapon. It has to be dropped off the back of a C-130 because it's too heavy to be suspended from an aircraft.

Berntsen's team was on the ground for 11 days of shelling, with the CIA running the show. Then Delta Force took over for the last five days. He says that, at Tora Bora, his request for Army Rangers was denied.

"We we wrote a message back to Washington, it goes back to CIA headquarters, that said, 'We need 600 to 800 Rangers. We need a battalion. We need to employ them in the following way: We need to put them between where bin Laden is at this moment and the border of Pakistan. We don't want him to escape.' "

But on Dec. 15 or 16, he did escape, Berntsen says, into Pakistan.

About this account, Gen. Tommy Franks has said: "Within 72 hours of the time we were receiving reporting on where Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora, I received similar reporting every place from Baluchistan to a lake up to the northwest of Kandahar.

"The fact... is that, at the end of the day, it would be the Afghans who would make the choice, who would make the decision about where they go in their country. And so we don't know. I don't know whether Osama bin Laden was in Tora Bora at that time."

Responds Berntsen: "Well, he disputes the fact that bin Laden was there. No one is disputing the fact that I wrote the message... And one day it will be declassified. And the sooner they declassify it, the better."

Michael Smerconish, the author of this take, isn't exactly some big flaming ultralib. At some point, even the apologists for Bush are going to have to turn themselves around in order to get on the right side of history.