Posted on 12/29/2005 8:27:44 AM PST by genefromjersey
Publication of “Jawbreaker” Excites Trolls !
A former “CIA Commander” – (that’s what Newsweek calls him ) – named Gary Berntsen has finally managed to secure CIA clearance for the publication of what looks to be an interesting book , entitled “Jawbreaker”.
According to Newsweek ,Mr. Berntsen says Osama bin Laden was able to escape from the siege of Tora Bora in December,2001 because US Central Command would not allow more American troops to be deployed.
He adds he was sure bin Laden was there,because sources he trusted had told him so ; and he disagrees with former CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks – because “ I was there and he wasn’t.”
With all due respect to Mr. Berntsen , he may be wrong about bin Laden: a close friend of the missing terrorist leader claims he left Tora Bora 10 days before the siege began – and his account is replete with small details that suggest high credibility.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1212-05.htm
This does not faze the Neo-Copperhead Trolls in the least.
They are,in fact suggesting President Bush let Osama bin Laden escape ,because :
(a) They were former business partners ;
(b) Bush didn’t want the war to end;
(c) Neo-Cons are stupid;
(d) It was all a Zionist / Theocratic /Homophobic plot.
At the risk of venturing over into Troll Territory myself, may I suggest that some of the Neo-Copperheads wanted large numbers of American troops on the ground in Afghanistan because it would increase friction between the Afghanis and the Americans, because it would increase the likelihood of American casualties, and because it would increase tension between the US and Pakistan to have so many of our troops milling about right next to the Pakistani border?
Any or all of these things would help make their original predictions about the Afghanistan campaign – (that we would become bogged down in the same sort of mess the Soviets encountered ) -come true:thus proving that they were “ right again”.
It didn’t work out that way. As a matter of fact, the Afghan campaign was a model of how unconventional special forces can be used to overthrow a regime.
If some of the Afghani troops were not up to snuff, what of it ?
It was Afghani troops who fought and died to take back their nation from the Taliban – with American assistance ; rather than the usual routine of Americans doing the dying while ineffectual “allies” skulk and pose in the background, criticizing their every move.
The Afghanistan campaign was a world class victory – whether Osama bin Laden escaped or not – and that’s something these hissing, writhing Neo-Copperheads cannot abide !
Knowing people that worked on the lessons learned from OEF and particularly that operation, I do know there were critical mistakes made, but what is that guy smoking?
Well, I still want to know the real reason why we had a 2 day lull.
I believe he's dead, because there has been no words from him since Tora-Bora. He was also ill with a kidney ailment. You don't last long without prompt real medical treatment. His followers would have buried him in the mountains or caves, somewhere where no one could possibly find the grave. That way they could still use him as a "leader in hiding." That Egyptian doctor Zawahiri is running the show, now. If Osama was known to be dead, the faithful in the rest of the world would be disenhearted. A martyr is not a good thing to have as your top leader. If it was, the leaders would be doing the suicide bombing themselves..............
I always (half) assume that Bin Ladin is retired from the fight, living in one of his family's villas along the Red Sea somewhere, probably being treated by private family physicians for his several ailments, driving the help crazy with his rants and war stories. He probably sits in his underwear watching "One Life to Live" and Oprah, hooked up to IV's.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/campaign/ground/torabora.html
With all due respect to PBS, I know more people that went to Afghanistan than PBS has viewers. I'm sure some of the 5th Group guys said that if we had more troops we could have caught him. (I'm sure that PBS took that comment out of context, as well). Everyone that's been in combat feels that things would have gone better if they had more guys to help out. While that is true that more troops would have increased our odds, most commanders will admit that our entire Army isn't nearly big enough to guarantee success at a task of that scale.
That's why I get a kick out of it when people say that 'if only we had more troops'. Go to Afghanistan some time, get up on one of those God forsaken mountains, and tell me how many troops you think it would take to catch one guy in that country.
It's not a number of troops issue, and it never was. It's an intelligence issue. Our military is configured completely wrong for counter terrorism and counterinsurgency, and we're moving at glacial speeds to fix it. Our intelligence collection is weak and subject to archaic restrictions. That bottlenecks our ability to project force the same way that a funnel would the stream of a firehose. Until the powers that be start making real changes, we'll always be too slow to catch the masterminds, and will take years to put down insurgencies that are only a few thousand strong.
After the fall of Kandahar, Tora Bora emerged very quickly on the radar screen, at least from my headquarters, as there was the potential for Al Qaeda presence and possibly other personnel could be hiding. One of the main questions early on was how these forces could actually muster to go into this massive mountainous area, to really go after and seal this area, search it in detail and prosecute an operation up there.
There has been a lot of discussion since about [whether] American forces [should have been on the ground in Tora Bora]. I would be a liar if I didn't say that certainly ... [with] American forces on the ground, we would have had a more conventionally confident force to do conventional search, seizure, isolate, cordon and search operations. But that search force wasn't available yet, and there was great impetus to do something to move up into these mountains. So we were asked to supply an A-team up in there to assist with [Afghan forces -- 2,000 or 3,000 totally, as I remember] you could muster to go up there and take on any Al Qaeda forces who we knew were there. ... Our function was to work with [anti-Taliban Afghan] forces and increase their capability as much as possible to move into the mountains, and then re-apply air power up there to destroy these caves and to kill as many Al Qaeda as possible. [Al Qaeda] wasn't interested in surrendering, by and large.
It would have been a difficult task for any military to go up in these mountains, search them out and take prisoners. This is incredible terrain, incredible elevations, and truthfully, very difficult with the force available to decisively search every nook and cranny, because there are no shortages of caves in Afghanistan. They probably number in the hundreds of thousands, if not 50 million. They just seem [to be] everywhere, and [they are] natural granite, not man-made. ...
[Did you believe bin Laden was in the caves?]
... It was as good a place for him to be as anywhere. It had ... access to a cross-border sanctuary of Pakistan ... very defendable terrain, known strongholds within the framework of the mountains. So in terms of an analytical perspective, certainly it met the criteria for a place he could likely be. Kandahar [was] no longer available to him. Whether or not he was there or not, I truly never had the level of intelligence to say he was or wasn't. But I think it was a reasonable expectation that it was a place he could be, and therefore we would prosecute an operation to try to determine whether he was there or not. ...
The mission was to try to destroy and eliminate the Al Qaeda presence there, and capture Osama bin Laden or any of his senior deputies that were there. We certainly did the former with the Al Qaeda fighters up there. We knew it would be a hard fight. Everywhere we had encountered ... the Taliban, they tended to recognize when the day was done; they would either surrender or make deals. The Al-Qaeda would fight pretty much to the death or look for avenues to escape to fight another day. We knew it would be a hard fight up there, no question about that. And it was. They fought very hard, until we killed them. ...
If terms of the mission were to try and go find and show the world that we had captured and killed Osama bin Laden -- even though we didn't do that -- that's a very difficult task. Some folks underestimated how difficult the task is to find somebody in his own backyard. ... At any rate ...we certainly accomplished a significant proportion of the mission which was to go up there and destroy Al Qaeda in his backyard, in his stronghold.
Was it perfect? No, it wasn't perfect. ... In hindsight maybe would we have liked to have done more? Absolutely, we would like to walk out of the mountains with bin Laden and his cronies in hand, certainly, but it didn't happen. I think it's a mistake for people to cast too glaring an indictment of that operation not understanding fully the context of what was going on with the battlefield at the time, what was available, and the urgency of when people wanted to see things happen.
Um, thanks for proving my point.
And just how did they confirm this? By word of mouth stories from Pashtun villagers? Eyewitness of the man himself? If they can confirm his life, then they can take his life...........
Intercept of mail. OBL is alive and well.
He has a P.O. Box?...........
Fingerhut catalogs.
or AOL offers........
"In what was meant as a harmless birthday prank,
three of Reagan High School's most popular girls,
Julie, Foxy, and Courtney pretend to kidnap their friend,
the latter shoving a jawbreaker into the victim's mouth
to keep her from screaming. Their plan goes awry
when the girl accidently swallows the jawbreaker,
choking to death. The cool and calculating Courtney
tries to cover the crime but is found out by school geek
Fern Mayo. In return for her silence,
Courtney transforms the gawky Fern
into the stylishly beautiful Vylette,
leaving the conscience-stricken Julie out in the cold,
threatening to set her up for the girl's murder
if she breaks her silence."
bttt
Where, and how, the military generates their intel product is no longer my place to know.
[sarc] Maybe it was by following OBL's trail of used Victoria Secret catalogs.[/sarc]
I saw the interview as well, and my jaw dropped when he became so dismissive of Tommy Franks..
NOW..I wasn't there, and I don't know what did or didn't happen, but this guy seemed so cocky, that he rubbed me the wrong way..
Perhaps CIA guys and Special Ops guys have a right to be cocky...especially since they are put in very dangerous situations...
But, I have always thought of Tora Bora as more of a dem "talking point" blame...and that Kerry, who used that as an example of Bush not "being tough enough"...was a trap.
Just like the mountainous terrain was a trap for our troops, using Tora Bora is a trap by the dems.
I think Tommy Franks would have been foolish to send troops into that place..I wish they would have had the bunker buster bombs that Kerry helped get voted DOWN in the Senate this last year to just flatten the area instead.
UBL is very much alive and being hunted by brave warriors 24/7 deep in indian Country. You do not hear about 99% of this continous hunt. But he is definitely alive and everyone from the CIC to the NCO's hunting his worthless as$ are aware of this fact.
UBL is most likely North of Peshawar - In the NW Frontier or maybe in Kashmir (an area that is off limits to outsiders and home to numerous Kashmiri militant groups, some of which are deeply intertwined with al-Qaeda.)
Capturing UBL in the NW Frontier is such an extremely difficult task most just can't comprehend. We are talking roughly 40,000 square miles of the most rugged terrain on earth! - Furthermore the Afghan / Pakistan border stretches 1,500 miles—roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver (just to get a clue).
Throughout the NW Frontier (and South toward Baluchistan) Pashtun tribes are completely in control. A group of warlords who are autonomous from any centralized Gov't - Pakistan troops (Gov't troops) haven't controlled these areas in about for the last 70 years -
Again the terrain in this region of the world is some of the most brutal on earth -Making any sustained operations a complete nightmare. Not to mention having to conduct any of these operations completely in the "black" (for a variety of reasons). And not just because we don't want other Nations to know....but because our operators stick out like a sore thumb in this part of the World.
The fact is Zarqawi continues to remain alive and free in Iraq - Yet there we have over 155,000 U.S. Soldiers, control of 90% + of the Country, the majority support of the people of Iraq who have twice voted for freedom and Intel sources that far out value what we have in the border regions of Pak/Stan -
In Stan we have less then 19,000 U.S. Soldiers, where only a fraction of those are actually near the border regions and even a smaller fraction of those can operate effectively there for sustained periods
The key to bagging Zarqawi (in Iraq) is to continue to shorten our OODA loop (which we are doing) - The key to UBL in stan is the same (to a lesser degree) but more importantly waiting on that one piece of HUMIT that gives him away - Then put our shooters on that location stat -
As for videos / communications? - UBL is much more concerned with staying alive then with putting out propaganda - Additionally how do you know he hasn't "tried" to put out more then the MSM and public are aware of? - These type items recovered "in transit" are not the types of materials we release to the press -
Furthermore why UBL may not put out frequent tapes is the obvious - There is a clear vulnerability to releasing audio and video tapes - That being the custody chain of these tapes could be traced back if snatched somewhere along the way (which has happened).
UBL remains alive and eking out a survival...but we'll nail his as$ one of these days -
And lastly...your comment
If they can confirm his life, then they can take his life...........
Is completely foolish. We have all sorts of people who we can confirm as "alive" that we want dead...that aren't yet!....Zarqawi, Mullah Omar, Al Zawahiri, Jalaluddin Haqqani & Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and another dozen names you most likely haven't heard of....and each of these HVT's are being hunted daily.
Good hunting. Maybe with some extraordinary luck, Bin Laden will show his head and we (you) can put it on a video.............or a stick............
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