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The top CIA commander in Afghanistan in December of 2001, Gary Berntsen, urgently requested 800 U.S. troops to block bin Laden's escape. The request was denied. CIA Deputy Counter Terrorism Director Hank Crumpton asked General Tommy Franks to send in reinforcements from the 1200 Marines who were stationed 80 miles away, in Kandahar, but that request was also denied. Osama bin Laden finally bribed the Northern Alliance warlords charged with blocking his escape, whom Berntsen had begged his superiors not to trust.
Both George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney later repeated General Franks' claim that the U.S was not sure bin Laden was trapped at Tora Bora. Both Bush and Cheney said in interviews: "We don't know if bin Laden was at Tora Bora." But Berntsen's contradiction is blunt. "I knew exactly where he was" he told MSNBC in 2005. He told Newsweek: "He was there." CIA field commander Gary Schroen, who was pulled out of retirement by the Bush administration to lay the groundwork for the assault on the Taliban 2 days after 9/11, is equally blunt in his concurrence with Berntsen, saying: "I have no doubt that he [bin Laden] was there [in Tora Bora]."
Al Qaeda was left to regenerate. Along with an Afghanistan reconstruction which was drowned in the bathtub, it resulted in the second wave of Al Qaeda resurgence we are seeing now.
What's next for the Bush-Era Accountability Movement, including TortureGate? The consensus seems to be for a special prosecutor. Investigative commissions and panels are too often used by the likes of John Conyers to generate a press release and then bury the issue for 2 months, rinse repeat until the session is over. But a prosecutor to prosecute whom? The instigators, that's who. In addition to John Yoo and the Torture Gurus, those who helped falsify intelligence and lied us into the war. Some will disagree, and say there is no excuse for following illegal orders, but "following orders" is too simple. If you cry for the victims of torture in Iraq, cry for the soldiers too. A man told me in a bar, after a bout of arguing politics and drinking, nearly in tears, "I'm ashamed of what I did in Iraq."
Those who knew better, and lied deliberately and in cold blood, over and over, deserve no such sympathy.
Rabbi Yitzchok Dov Koppelman wrote:
"one who causes another to sin is worse than one who murders another person...Of a murderer it is written, "The congregation shall judge him and save him."
Those who know full well what they were doing, and stated it clearly and concisely as far back as their membership in the Project for a New American Century, must be the targets. This is no invisible and mysterious cabal we are helpless to oppose. This is a small number of men (and women) like Douglas Feith, who ran a rogue intelligence operation to feed misinformation like Curveball's, a certifiable nut according to German intelligence who nevertheless was used in Colin Powell's speech to the UN, men like Dick Cheney, who while in the command bunker clearly issued the order to not shoot down the second incoming airliner, which was sure to hit. It's time for the movement to start naming all the names, over and over, so that citizens can understand these are real live people who can be touched by the law.
Implicate all of congress? Because they were looking at the same intelligence? No, they weren't. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate presented to congress before the war, the administration's key document, was scrubbed of the conclusion by 16 US intelligence agencies that Saddam was NOT an imminent threat, and would attack or pass on WMD to a terrorists organization only if attacked first. Big, big time deception well-documented in Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder."
On this day before nationwide rallies for the appointment of a special prosecutor, the suspected war criminals are:
1 Abrams, Elliot
2 Addington, David
3 Ashcroft, John
4 Bellinger III, John B.
5 Bolton, John R.
6 Bremer, Paul
7 Bush, George W
8 Bybee, Jay S.
9 Card Jr., Andrew H.
10 Cheney, Richard
11 Chertoff, Michael B.
12 Feith, Douglas
13 Franks, General Tommy Ray
14 Gates, Robert M.
15 Gonzales, Alberto R.
16 Hadley, Stephen John
17 Hayden, Michael V.
18 Haynes, William J
19 Libby, I. Lewis "Scooter"
20 Negroponte, John Dimitri
21 Pelosi, Nancy
22 Perle, Richard Norman
23 Petraeus, David H.
24 Powell, Colin Luther
25 Prince, Erik. D
26 Rice, Condoleeza
27 Rove, Karl Christian
28 Rumsfeld, Donald H.
29 Tenet, George John
30 Wolfowitz, Paul Dundes
31 Yoo, John Choon
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