Tommy Franks Spins for BushCo

[Sparkly]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&nci...
Franks, who has endorsed Republican President Bush (news - web sites)'s re-election bid, challenged the Massachusetts senator's contention that U.S. forces had the fugitive al Qaeda leader surrounded but "outsourced" the job of capturing him to Afghan forces in the rugged Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan.

This is RECENT history. I'm sure many of us remember exactly what happened. They sent in the rebels supposedly because they knew the cave complexes, with a few of our special ops. Mostly we dropped bombs. But tell me the US military, with all our might, couldn't have secured a 10-square-mile radius around those caves? Come ON. BushCo didn't want to expend the political capital in troops killed & injured because they had other plans (read: Iraq).

I'm sure there are plenty of articles out there from three years ago to confirm this. Quick find:

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/12/21/ret.shepperd /
The eastern alliance has essentially finished fighting the al Qaeda and Taliban forces in the Tora Bora area. Those people have mostly vanished, fleeing to other locations. (snip)... In response to (the fleeing), it's apparent that General Franks is going to deploy several hundred more U.S troops.

So why weren't those several hundred there BEFORE the "fleeing?!"

[i_c_a_White_Ghost]

1. Tommy's been on that bandwagon some time now

Hey Tommy? Time for some Kool Aid! :beer:

[Unstuck In Time]

2. Bush let bin Laden get away. All the after-the-fact rationalizing...

... won't change that. Bush had him cornered, and blew it. Unforgivable.

[Bush was AWOL]

3. Franks is full of it

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=Tora+Bora

[Sparkly]

4. Here's a GOOD one!!!! Check this out....

U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight
Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error

By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 17, 2002; Page A01

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December.

After-action reviews, conducted privately inside and outside the military chain of command, describe the episode as a significant defeat for the United States. A common view among those interviewed outside the U.S. Central Command is that Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war's operational commander, misjudged the interests of putative Afghan allies and let pass the best chance to capture or kill al Qaeda's leader. Without professing second thoughts about Tora Bora, Franks has changed his approach fundamentally in subsequent battles, using Americans on the ground as first-line combat units.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62618-2002Apr16?language=printer

Now Franks is pretending we don't even know whether Bin Laden was there. He's covering his own ass in addition to the Chimp's.

[Bush was AWOL]

5. Yep. It's obvious. n/m