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Rumsfeld let Bin Laden escape in 2001, says Senate report

Inquiry says US failure to attack al-Qaida's leader at Tora Bora had
far-reaching consequences

* Buzz up!
* Digg it

* Ed Pilkington in New York
* guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 November 2009 19.07 GMT
* Article history

Osama bin Laden, left, with his top lieutenant Egyptian Ayman al-
Zawahiri, in one of al-Qaida's own propaganda videos

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in an al-Qaida propaganda video.
Photograph: AP

Donald Rumsfeld had the chance when he was US defence secretary in
December 2001 to make sure Osama bin Laden was killed or captured, but
let him slip through his hands, a Senate report has found.

The report by the Senate foreign relations committee is damning of the
way George Bush's administration conducted the aftermath of its
bombing campaign in Afghanistan, saying it amounted to a "lost
opportunity". It states that as a result of allowing the al-Qaida
leader to flee from his Tora Bora stronghold into Pakistan, Americans
were left more vulnerable to terrorism, and the foundations were laid
for today's protracted Afghan insurgency. It also lays blame for the
July 2005 London bombings on a failure to kill the al-Qaida leaders at
Tora Bora.

Republican critics are likely to dismiss the report as a partisan work
designed to deflect the current military troubles in Afghanistan away
from President Barack Obama and on to his predecessor. The committee
is Democratic-controlled.

But the report contains a mass of evidence that points towards the
near certainty that Bin Laden was in the Tora Bora district of the
White Mountains in eastern Afghanistan, along with up to 1,500 of his
most loyal al-Qaida fighters and bodyguards, in late November 2001,
shortly before the fall of Kabul.

Further evidence came from al-Qaida suspects detained at Guantánamo
and, most authoritatively, from the official history of the US special
operations command, which confirms bin Laden's presence at Tora Bora.

"Osama bin Laden's demise would not have erased the worldwide threat
from extremists," it concludes. "But the failure to kill or capture
him has allowed Bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in
the region."