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Senate Report Revisits Osama bin Laden's Great Escape
Alex Kingsbury
Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the military began bombing al Qaeda targets in
Just nine weeks into the campaign, a group of fewer than 100 commandos came tantalizingly close to killing or capturing
The failure to stop the al Qaeda leader amid those inhospitable peaks in eastern
Long a controversial episode in the opening months of the war on terrorism, the events at Tora Bora have frequently surfaced as a cudgel for critics to challenge tactical decisions made by former President
"The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in
Additional U.S. forces--requested by commanders on the scene but rejected by the Pentagon--could have blocked routes that bin Laden and his entourage are believed to have used to escape the battlefield. "The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the
While largely ignoring the Tora Bora report, some Republicans pointed to other failed attempts to kill bin Laden, dating back to the Clinton administration.
Though most of the information contained in the report has already surfaced in the public domain, it does aim to settle disputed aspects of the events. Franks and Vice President
The report, based on publicly available information and interviews with military commanders, intelligence officials, and others present at the battle, claims that the available evidence "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that
The Special Operations Command history was released in 2007, but while it is a public document, it has received little attention in the media. The summary of events from the military study, combined with the
Special Forces troops in the area are described as orchestrating airstrikes against enemy positions while struggling to manage recalcitrant allied warlords on whose firepower and troops the U.S. effort would come to depend. U.S. commandos also turned to local Afghan villagers, who were given small GPS devices and asked to use them to record the exact location of al Qaeda fighters and arms caches. The locals then returned the devices with the stored data to U.S. forces in exchange for rewards. The GPS coordinates were given to warplanes to plot attacks.
On
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- Assigning Blame in the White House Crasher Scandal
- 'The Great Global Security Underwriter' Will Pay a High Price
- Obama's Surge in Afghanistan Hardly a Surprise
- U.S. May Take New Look at 'War on Drugs'
Senate Report Revisits Osama bin Laden's Great Escape | Alex Kingsbury
(c) 2009 U.S. News & World Report