The Eleventh Day

73 devastation: Fury, 270, 272, Berntsen & Pezzullo, 296;

74 not a trace/?“punched”/?rubble/?Exhumations: Fury, 286, 282, Newsweek, 10/31/08;

75 “real war”: Fury, 293;

76 “We need”: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 290;

77 Dailey: Berntsen & Pezzullo, e.g., 307, 276;

78 “We have not said”: DOD press conference, 11/8/01, www.defense.gov, & see Franks with McConnell, 388;

79 skirted discussion: ibid.

80 As recently as 2009: In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, and on the PBS program Frontline, Franks suggested that the drive to “get into Tora Bora” came from the Afghan commanders. A decision was made, he said, to support the Afghan operation and to “work with the Pakistanis along the Pakistani border.” He declared himself “satisfied with the decision process.” CIA’s Gary Berntsen has responded by writing that Franks was “either badly misinformed or blinded by the fog of war.” Berntsen had made it clear in his reports, he said, that the Afghans were less than keen to attack Tora Bora. General Franks, meanwhile, has also said he had concerns as to the amount of time it would have taken to get U.S. troops into the mountains. He has pointed out, too, most recently in 2009, that relying principally on Afghan ground forces in the field had worked in overthrowing the Taliban (“get into”/“work with”: int. Tommy Franks for Frontline, www.pbs.org; “satisfied”: Testimony of Tommy Franks, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 7/31/02, www.access.gpo.gov; Berntsen: Berntsen & Pezzullo, 290–; concerns: New Republic, 12/22/09).

81 “conflicting”: New Republic, 12/22/09 & see NYT, 10/19/04, MFR 04021460, 4/9/04. General Michael DeLong, who had been Franks’s deputy at CentCom, wrote in his September 2004 memoir that bin Laden “was definitely there when we hit the caves.” Then, after Franks had expressed doubt in an October 19 article, he abruptly reversed himself. “Most people fail to realize,” DeLong wrote in a November 1 article in The Wall Street Journal, “that it is quite possible that bin Laden was never in Tora Bora to begin with.” There was a report the same month—citing what Taliban sources had purportedly said at the time—that bin Laden had been “nowhere near Tora Bora” but had sent a decoy there to deceive U.S. intelligence. If the Taliban did make such a claim, there is no good reason to credit it. If bin Laden was indeed at Tora Bora, the claim was as likely disinformation designed to take pressure off. (For what it is worth, bin Laden himself in a 2003 audiotape spoke of the Tora Bora battle as though he was present.) The intelligence cited by Berntsen and Fury as to bin Laden having been at Tora Bora, on the other hand —information from human sources coupled with voice recognition of intercepted radio conversations—remains persuasive (“was definitely”: U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 8; “Most people”: WSJ, 11/1/04 & see MFR 04021460 4/9/04, CF; “nowhere near”: CounterPunch, 11/1/04—citing Kabir Mohabbat; bin Laden: ed. Lawrence, 18–).

82 “The generals”: Fury, xxiii–.

83 “never took”: NYT, 10/19/04. During his 2004 campaign against Bush for the presidency, Senator John Kerry claimed the President “took his eye off the ball, off of Osama bin Laden” (second Bush-Kerry debate, 4/10/08, cbsnews.com);

84 “get” bin Laden: Woodward, Bush at War, 254, 224, 311, The Times (London), 10/14/01;

85 “going to lose”: Suskind, One Percent, 58–;

86 “asking”: Fury, 148;

87 “obsessed”: Suskind, One Percent, 96, Woodward, Bush at War, 338;

88 “Terror’s bigger”: Bush press conference, http://archives.cnn.com, 3/13/02.

89 taken Rumsfeld: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 1–;

90 “Goddamn!”: ibid., 8 & see Franks, 315;

91 general pestered: Woodward, Plan of Attack, 31, 36–, 42– & see Michael Gordon & Bernard Trainor, Cobra II, NY: Pantheon, 2006, 25–.

92 “a natural”: al-Wafd (Egypt), 12/26/01, citing Pakistan Observer, www.opednews.com, Fox News, 12/26/01;

93 escape/wound: Newsweek, 10/31/08, Fury, 286, New Republic, 10/22/07, NYT, 9/23/02, Bergen, OBL I Know, 334–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 2;

94 2011 reports/tribes: Guardian (U.K.), 4/26/11, Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011, 131.

95 Good evidence/02/03/04: Not included here as an indication of bin Laden’s survival is a videotaped statement shown by Al Jazeera on December 26, 2001. Though that transmission postdated the Tora Bora battle, all one knows for sure—because of a reference in the statement to the bombing “some days ago” of a mosque at Khost—is that it was recorded shortly after November 16. Thus not necessarily after the Tora Bora conflict ended—on December 17 (ed. Lawrence, 151–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited, 14).

96 “We agreed”: Though not all the hijacked flights took off on time on 9/11, they had been scheduled to take off within the same twenty-five-minute period. The authors have in these paragraphs cited letters and tapes attributed to bin Laden, edited by Professor Bruce Lawrence, humanities professor of religion at Duke University, translated by James Howarth, and published in book form.

“Although the question of authenticity inevitably arises whenever a message is released in bin Laden’s name,” Howarth wrote, the statements in the book had all “been accepted as genuine by a majority of the experts and officials who have examined them.” Lawrence and others have cast doubt on the authenticity of other taped statements attributed to bin Laden, allowing for the possibility of forgery for propaganda purposes.

It is not a ridiculous notion, for the CIA is on record as having fabricated film footage. In the late 1950s it arranged for the making of a film purportedly showing President Sukarno of Indonesia in bed with a woman in the Soviet Union. As late as 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, there was discussion about making a video showing Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy. According to a

Washington Post

report, the CIA actually did make a video “purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys.”

Doubts have been expressed about a videotape released in December 2001, supposedly following its seizure by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It purports to show bin Laden in conversation the previous month with a visiting sheikh, openly acknowledging his foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. While there may be other good reasons to doubt the

tape’s authenticity, the authors suggest that a couple of points made in support of the forgery theory have no validity.

Skeptics noted that the bin Laden figure wears a ring in the video—supposedly out of character for him, perhaps even contrary to religious law. As noted in another chapter, his wife Najwa had given him a ring as a token of her affection just before leaving Afghanistan on the eve of 9/11. He is, moreover, shown wearing a ring in another video accepted as authentic. Bin Laden’s son Omar, meanwhile, has scotched the argument that a shot of his father writing with his right hand is a giveaway—as the real Osama was supposedly left-handed. “My father,” Omar wrote in 2009, “is right-handed.”

That is not to say that the “confession” videotape is necessarily authentic. Professor Lawrence did not use the transcript of it in his published collection on bin Laden, and has reportedly expressed the view that the tape is indeed a fake. No quotations from it have been used in this book (scheduled: CR, 10; ed. Lawrence, 158–244 & see BBC News, 4/15/04, “The Osama bin Laden Tapes,” Special Report, undated,

www.guardian.co.uk

; Sukarno: Interim Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Govt. Ops with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, D.C.: U.S.