Tora Bora

From dKosopedia

Category: Afganistan

Tora Bora, Kabul, Peshawar, and other cities in Nangarhar Province.

Tora Bora is a small mountainous region in Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province. The Bush Presidency claimed that the Taliban and al Qaeda had a vast sophisticated network of underground bunkers in the Tora Bora region, and that this was where Osama Bin Laden his prior to escaping to Pakistan.

The region is near the top of the mountains that lie south of the Khyber Pass.

CIA Commander: U.S. Let bin Laden Slip Away by Michael Hirsh, Newsweek:

"In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer [field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members.

" [T]he CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK.