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RABAT, Morocco - For more than a decade, Osama bin Laden had few soldiers more devoted than Abdallah Tabarak. A former Moroccan transit worker, Tabarak served as a bodyguard for the al Qaeda leader, worked on his farm in Sudan and helped run a gemstone smuggling racket in Afghanistan, court records here show. During the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when al Qaeda leaders were pinned down by U.S. forces, Tabarak sacrificed himself to engineer their escape. He headed toward the Pakistani border while making calls on Osama bin Laden's satellite phone as bin Laden and the others...

Osama bin Laden has vowed never to be taken alive and once gave his bodyguard a pistol with two bullets to shoot him if it appeared that he might be caught, according to a new book of interviews with people who know the al Qaeda leader. The book excerpted in the new issue of Vanity Fair, "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History" by CNN security expert Peter Bergen, also says bin Laden intensely dislikes deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. After the 2001 attacks on the United States carried out by al Qaeda the Bush administration made much...

Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Let's face it. He shouldn't be hard to find, especially from a Predator, an aerial reconnaissance vehicle that can read the minute hand of a wristwatch from an altitude of 26,000 feet. Bin Laden is very tall – slightly over 6'6" – and incredibly thin, less than 150 pounds. He wears shalwart kameez – the loose-fitting tunics and baggy pants of al-Qaida and Taliban soldiers – and, when the weather is cold, he dons a camouflage jacket. Although he was born in 1957 and far from retirement age, the al-Qaida chieftain appears...

Former CIA Officer Sues to Publish Book Detailing Osama Bin Laden's EscapeBy Katherine Shrader Associated Press Writer Published: Jul 28, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA is squelching publication of a new book detailing events leading up to Osama bin Laden's escape from his Tora Bora mountain stronghold during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, says a former CIA officer who led much of the fighting. In a story he says he resigned from the agency to tell, Gary Berntsen recounts the attacks he coordinated at the peak of the fighting in eastern Afghanistan in late 2001, including how U.S. commanders...

JALALABAD, Afghanistan, May 31, 2005 – When the U.S. Marine Corps' 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, ventured into the Tora Bora mountains recently to hunt down enemy fighters, they instead found Afghans eager for a brighter future. Navy Corpsman David Stanfield watches a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter descend into a landing zone to drop off aid supplies for Marines to distribute during Operation Celtics in Afghanistan's rugged Torah Bora mountains. Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Rick Scavetta, USA The mission, dubbed Operation Celtics, began as an offensive in an enemy sanctuary - the rugged mountains of Nangahar province that...

Tin SoldierAn American Vigilante In Afghanistan, Using the Press for Profit and Glory By Mariah Blake In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the...

Mar 23, 8:51 AM EST Document: Bin Laden Evaded U.S. Forces By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- A commander for Osama bin Laden during Afghanistan's war with the Soviet Union who helped the al-Qaida leader escape American forces at Tora Bora is being held by U.S. authorities, a government document says. The document represents the first definitive statement from the Pentagon that bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was at Tora Bora and evaded his pursuers. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney asserted during the presidential election that commanders did...

WASHINGTON: A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a commander for Osama Bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped the Al Qaeda leader escape his mountain hideout at Tora Bora in 2001, according to a US government document. The document, provided to The Associated Press in response to a ‘freedom of information’ request, says the unidentified detainee “assisted in the escape of Osama from Tora Bora.” It is the first definitive statement from the Pentagon that Osama was at Tora Bora and evaded US pursuers. The detainee is not identified by name...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a commander for Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped the al-Qaida leader escape his mountain hideout at Tora Bora in 2001, according to a U.S. government document. The document, provided to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information request, says the unidentified detainee "assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora." The detainee is not identified by name or nationality. He is described as being "associated with" al-Qaida and having called for a jihad,...

U.S. concludes Bin Laden escaped at Tora Bora fight and that the failure to send troops in pursuit termed major error

Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday. The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday "the U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men." Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K. Idema, that he was a "special adviser" to their security forces, saying...

Hunting for Osama bin Laden, the C.I.A. established a series of small, covert bases in the rugged mountain frontier of northwest Pakistan in late 2003. Mr. bin Laden, the terrorist leader, was being sheltered there by local tribesmen and foreign militants, the agency had concluded, and controlled a group of handpicked operatives dedicated to attacking the United States. But since the bases opened, the C.I.A. officers stationed there have been strictly supervised by Pakistani officials, who have limited their ability to operate and have escorted them wherever they travel in the Pakistani border region. As a result, it has been...

It is [said]... the only sure winner in American politics is the media.... Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority. Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer... National Guard... Abu Ghraib......

With Osama Bin Laden emerging anew as an issue in the presidential election, the Bush administration has flatly denied it bungled a chance to capture the mastermind of terror at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. White House officials and retired Gen. Tommy Franks assert that there is no evidence Bin Laden was ever present inside the mountain redoubt in late November and early December of 2001. As a reporter who closely tracked Bin Laden's movements at Tora Bora in late 2001, I would like to point out some glaring contradictions. Overwhelming evidence indicates that Bin Laden, accompanied by a large entourage...

In a semi-coherent videotaped message, Osama bin Laden is trying to influence the Tuesday election by castigating President George W. Bush for everything from oppression of Muslims to passage of the Patriot Act. The message reads as if al Qaeda has become a nightmarish version of a "527" group. But it is very bad news for John Kerry. As the Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday, bin Laden, "...did not endorse Mr Kerry for election but did effectively campaign against Mr Bush, saying: 'Despite entering the fourth year after September 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth...

QandO Explodes The Afganistan "Outsourcing" Myth Jon Henke at QandO, the essential neolibertarian blog, does some research on John Kerry's oft-repeated assertion that the US "outsourced" its efforts at Tora Bora in order to do war on the cheap. Despite the vehement denials by General Tommy Franks and others within the Afghan operation and the detailed explanations as to why our strategy not only made sense but paid off, Kerry continues to use this canard as a major part of his stump speeches. It should surprise no one at this date that Kerry's position represents a complete reversal from what...

KERRY'S TORA-BORA 'OUTSOURCING' LIEPOURQUOI JOHN KERRY EST DANGEREUX POUR L'AMÉRIQUE   (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE) thanx to Wolverine for the audio NEW! compleatjohnkerry.blogspot.com NEW! unfitforcommand.blogspot.comjohnkerryisdangerousforamerica.blogspot.com "What we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.... I think we have been smart; I think the administration leadership has done it well and we are on the right track." JOHN...

...We strategized Tora Bora in essentially the same way [as] the Afghanistan war: by using a combination of our elite Special Forces and CIA Agents, embedded with native Afghan troops. We chose this approach in waging the Afghan war for many reasons: it minimized the number of U.S. troops put in harm's way; it drew on the strengths of the native Afghans who had been fighting in that terrain for years and who were adept at traversing the mountainous terrain on horseback; and it helped avoid the same mistake the Soviets made in Afghanistan. They had opted for a large...

In the campaign’s final days, Kerry continues to claim that Bush “outsourced” the job of going after bin Laden in Tora Bora (search) to Afghan warlords. But the Democrat’s charge rankles not only retired Gen. Tommy Franks, a strong Bush supporter on the campaign trail, but also Army special forces soldiers who say they searched for bin Laden in Tora Bora’s treacherous mountains.

NEW YORK Knight Ridder's Washington bureau has provided some of the best reporting on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, often by relying on non-official sources and its staffers' own observation and investigation. In that way, the bureau has usually avoided simple "he said/she said" summations. Today, in a story sent to Knight Ridder newspapers, the bureau examined the current, and perhaps crucial, election debate in the aftermath of the new Osama bin Laden video: Did the U.S. military let the terrorist leader escape in Tora Bora nearly three years ago? Sen. John Kerry has declared that United States failed...