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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (28074)	6/3/2004 4:54:58 PM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

<So you just made it up. That's what I thought. __________________________ Failure to send troops in pursuit termed gravest error of war so far By Barton Gellman and Thomas E. Ricks THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON, April 17 — 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. --snip-- “We [messed] up by not getting into Tora Bora sooner and letting the Afghans do all the work,” said a senior official with direct responsibilities in counterterrorism. “Clearly a decision point came when we started bombing Tora Bora and we decided just to bomb, because that’s when he escaped. ... We didn’t put U.S. forces on the ground, despite all the brave talk, and that is what we have had to change since then.” hypocrites.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (28074)	6/3/2004 5:09:33 PM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

<..the 5th special force which were pulled off of the job of looking for bin Laden and sent to Iraq to hunt for Saddam. We were talking about Tora Bora. Nov. 2001. Long before the hunt for Saddam. ..t least one of them who said they were close to finding bin Laden when they were pulled out. If you don't show me a link on that, I'll think you just made it up too. ____________________________ Brumar I want you to remember this. The next time you make any post without a link to something you claim I reserve the right to call you a liar and will show you this post. You can say whatever you want about what you feel I should have been talking about when I made the comment. I was talking about junior's preoccupation with Iraq to the detriment of the search for bin Laden when I said he pulled the 5th special forces out. _____________________________ Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions By Dave Moniz and Steven Komarow, USA TODAY WASHINGTON — In 2002, troops from the 5th Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures. The CIA, meanwhile, was stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan. When the White House raised a new priority, it took specialists away from the Afghanistan effort to ensure Iraq was covered. Those were just two of the tradeoffs required because of what the Pentagon and CIA acknowledge is a shortage of key personnel to fight the war on terrorism. The question of how much those shifts prevented progress against al-Qaeda and other terrorists is putting the Bush administration on the defensive. Even before the invasion, the wisdom of shifting resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq was raised privately by top military officials and publicly by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others. Now it's being hotly debated again following an election-year critique of the Bush administration by its former counterterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke. "If we catch him (bin Laden) this summer, which I expect, it's two years too late," Clarke said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "Because during those two years when forces were diverted to Iraq ... al-Qaeda has metamorphosized into a hydra-headed organization with cells that are operating autonomously, like the cells that operated in Madrid recently." The Bush administration says the hunt for bin Laden continued throughout the war in Iraq. Officials say it's wrong to speculate that he would have been captured, or other terrorist attacks prevented, if the Iraq war hadn't happened. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking on ABC's This Week, called the example of the Special Forces switch "simplistic." But the Pentagon tacitly acknowledged a problem last year, after the Iraq invasion. It created a new organization, Task Force 121, to better oversee commando operations in the region and ensure a faster response when terrorists can be struck. Now gaps in capability are being closed as the administration puts record amounts of money into military and spy agencies. More spy aircraft such as the Predator drone are arriving. More troops are getting Arabic training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. CIA Director George Tenet said this month that the agency is filling shortfalls, especially among translators. Still, the question lingers: Did opening a second front hurt the main effort to defeat terrorism? Bob Andrews, former head of a Pentagon office that oversaw special operations, says that removing Saddam Hussein was a good idea but "a distraction." The war in Iraq, Andrews notes, entailed the largest deployment of special operations forces — about 10,000 —since the Vietnam War. That's about 25% of all U.S. commandos. It also siphoned spy aircraft and light infantry soldiers. Iraq proved such a drain, one former Pentagon official notes, that there were no AWACS radar jets to track drug-trafficking aircraft in South America. Saddam was not an immediate threat. "This has been a real diversion from the longer struggle against jihadists," especially in the intelligence field, he says. Stan Florer, a retired Army colonel and former Green Beret, agrees that Iraq diverted enormous military and intelligence assets. But he argues that long-standing disputes with Saddam needed to be addressed: "This was tearing at us all the time. It was a bleeding wound with Saddam calling the shots in the Middle East." usatoday.com