Coming up on Face the Nation Donald Rumsfeld ....

[Botany]

.... on how I didn't catch Osama bin Laden. I think I can skip it because
thanks to DU I know the real story. :puke:


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.

snip


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.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/osama-bin-laden-senate-report

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.

[BeyondGeography]

1. He was always focused more on Iraq, even back then, and that's what overwhelmed him

Once they went that route, it's all he thought about. Osama was just a footnote in the end for him.

Under siege in April 2006, when a series of retired generals denounced him and called for his resignation in newspaper op-ed pieces, Rumsfeld produced a memo after a conference call with military analysts. "Talk about Somalia, the Philippines, etc. Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists," he wrote.

...The meeting also led Rumsfeld to write that he needed a team to help him "go out and push people back, rather than simply defending" Iraq policy and strategy. "I am always on the defense. They say I do it well, but you can't win on the defense," he wrote. "We can't just keep taking hits."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103095.html