The U.S had OBL cornered in Tora Bora, so why did he escape? Was it due to incompetence or because 'the hunt for OBL 'justified' invading Afghanistan and staying there to set up a puppet regime, 'friendly' to the U.S regime?
Here is one account of what happened:
Here is one account of what happened:
Bin Laden's Tora Bora escape, just months after 9/11
Only a few months after 9/11, American troops located Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan - so how was he able to evade them?
As members of the British Special Boat Service (SBS) team listened in to conversations on a captured short wave radio, they heard a voice they believed to be their target.
Two of the team spotted a tall figure in a camouflage jacket moving with a 50-man protective detail, who went into a cave through a hidden entrance.
Only a few months after the 11 September 2001 attacks, Osama Bin Laden seemed to be cornered in the mountains of Afghanistan, close to the Pakistani border.
Tora Bora promised to be his final stand. So how did he escape?
The SBS soldiers had joined an American-led team alongside CIA and US Special Forces who had followed Bin Laden from Jalalabad into the White Mountains and finally to Tora Bora, a remote complex of caves.
Once the team approached the foot of the mountains, they took over a schoolhouse as a base.
Four men headed into the mountains, accompanied by 10 Afghans. It was the most rugged terrain many had ever experienced.
Unused ammunition lies on the ground in a cave previously used by al-Qaeda soldiers in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in December 2001 The multi-storied cave complex at Tora Bora was widely thought to be Bin Laden's headquarters
When they reached an outcrop and saw a large group of up to about 900 al-Qaeda figures, the battle for Tora Bora began.
The commander back at base, Gary Berntsen, issued orders to open fire. He only told headquarters after the fact.
The team called in air strikes over the next 56 hours.
"We threw everything at him. I didn't even know we had that many B52 or B1s," one of the Special Forces soldiers who was on the ground told the BBC, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Everybody was trying to get into the fight because… he was there. I can tell you that we dropped so much munitions on this place that we actually changed the landscape. The map is different."
'Political calculations'
More soldiers joined the team, but it never numbered more than 100. Three sections made a push up the mountain.
Further conversations overheard on captured al-Qaeda radios indicated that Bin Laden was still alive. The tone of his intercepted communications changed.
"It became more of desperation that doom is coming," recalls one American soldier. The Americans believed he was within a mile and a quarter (2 km) of one of the teams.
As they moved across Afghanistan pursuing Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, British teams discovered plans for a follow-up attack to 9/11, according to CIA officer Gary Berntsen:
"They were the ones that debriefed the individual in question. We had had access to that prisoner. The British did it.
"And the British - a very capable British officer - was the one that was able to gain the confidence of an al-Qaeda member who then told him that the follow-on attacks to 9/11 are going to be 20 tonnes of explosives in Singapore, they're going to destroy the US, British and Israeli embassies there."
Following the interrogation, Singaporean authorities conducted their first raid on 9 December 2001 and went on to find surveillance video and bomb-making instructions. They said a major plot had been foiled.
Members of that team wanted to push forward but were told to wait since they lacked numbers.
"Every now and again, we'd talk about mutiny and just moving up," a member recalls...snipped
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14190032
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Gary Berntsen retired & wrote a book "Jawbreaker". He alleges that Osama bin Laden could have been captured at Tora Bora if the US military (specifically United States Central Command) had devoted more resources to the operation.
