http://foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Tora_Bora_Report.pdf
Rated • 1 review • senate.gov
'Tora Bora Revisited: how we failed to get bin Laden and why it matters today'
From the page: "Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.
The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines."
(From the Report's Executive Summary, that is.)
It's a very interesting Report, with lots to agree and disagree with.
But there's a lot of news coverage these days about the specifics of the failed chance to get bin Laden, as quoted above. After all, the whole Tora Bora thing was about destroying as much as possible of al-Qaeda high command, and about bin Laden (i.e. getting him dead or alive).
bin Laden being the overall al-Qaeda commander, he was the target. So of course when a major opportunity arises to take him (out), you sort of stand down, hahaha! This kind of thing has happened a number of times, albeit usually on a much, much smaller scale.
There was a pattern of political US decision-making preventing bin Laden from getting killed. Keep your enemy alive, so that you can spread fear through him (remember the 'War on Terror'? -the Obama Administration has abandoned the phrase, but not much else). Continued US policy, unchanged after Bush II, demands that the threat be kept up.
bin Laden died of physical trouble in 2004 or 2005.
When you see how difficult it is for a lot of people to even consider the possibility that bin Laden has been dead since some years now, you also see how successful western propaganda has been in sort of 'keeping him alive'.
From the page: "Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.
The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines."
(From the Report's Executive Summary, that is.)
It's a very interesting Report, with lots to agree and disagree with.
But there's a lot of news coverage these days about the specifics of the failed chance to get bin Laden, as quoted above. After all, the whole Tora Bora thing was about destroying as much as possible of al-Qaeda high command, and about bin Laden (i.e. getting him dead or alive).
bin Laden being the overall al-Qaeda commander, he was the target. So of course when a major opportunity arises to take him (out), you sort of stand down, hahaha! This kind of thing has happened a number of times, albeit usually on a much, much smaller scale.
There was a pattern of political US decision-making preventing bin Laden from getting killed. Keep your enemy alive, so that you can spread fear through him (remember the 'War on Terror'? -the Obama Administration has abandoned the phrase, but not much else). Continued US policy, unchanged after Bush II, demands that the threat be kept up.
bin Laden died of physical trouble in 2004 or 2005.
When you see how difficult it is for a lot of people to even consider the possibility that bin Laden has been dead since some years now, you also see how successful western propaganda has been in sort of 'keeping him alive'.
