It's an old story that Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Tora Bora. The Bush administration, of course, has denied that this is what happened.
But here's a new development. Gary Berntsen, who was at Tora Bora, is about to publish a book entitled Jawbreaker that will tell his side of the story. OBL was at Tora Bora, he says, without a doubt. Michael Hirsh of Newsweek has written a brief piece about Berntsen and his forthcoming book.
Here's a telling paragraph from Hirsh's article:
. . . 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."
Not quite a year ago I posted an entry about the failure to get OBL.