9/11: "Not Concerned About bin Laden", Then and Now

By Jeralyn, Section War on Terror
Posted on Mon Sep 11, 2006 at 07:11:08 AM EST
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(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Five years ago today, Al Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, perpetrated the most heinous attack against the United States on our territory since Pearl Harbor. As the CIA warned President Bush and his administration in its August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States using hijacked airplanes. As President Bush noted at the time, the CIA had "covered [its] ass." In December 2001, President Bush chose to let bin Laden, the person behind the murder of nearly 3,000 souls, go:

Well past midnight one morning in early December 2001, according to American intelligence officials, Osama bin Laden sat with a group of top aides - including members of his elite international 055 Brigade - in the mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. Outside, it was blustery and bitterly cold; many of the passes of the White Mountains, of which Tora Bora forms a part, were already blocked by snow. . . .

. . . Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign.

. . . By now, the Taliban's stronghold in Kandahar had fallen or, more correctly, had been abandoned by the soldiers of the regime. The Taliban retreat from Kandahar was emblematic of the war. None of Afghanistan's cities had been won by force alone. Taliban fighters, after intense bombing, had simply made strategic withdrawals. A number of American officers were now convinced that this was about to happen at Tora Bora, too.

One of them was Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of some 4,000 marines who had arrived in the Afghan theater by now. Mattis, along with another officer with whom I spoke, was convinced that with these numbers he could have surrounded and sealed off bin Laden's lair, as well as deployed troops to the most sensitive portions of the largely unpatrolled border with Pakistan. He argued strongly that he should be permitted to proceed to the Tora Bora caves. The general was turned down. An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration late