Posted: April 17, 2002
2:30 p.m. Eastern
FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES


The Bush administration now has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year, according to the Washington Post. The failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al-Qaida, military and civilian officials told the Post.

Intelligence officials have assembled decisive evidence that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex and slipped away in the first ten days of December.

The Bush administration has never acknowledged that bin Laden slipped through the cordon ostensibly placed around Tora Bora as U.S. aircraft began bombing on Nov. 30, the Post said.

Some excerpts from DEBKAfile's exclusive report of Dec. 8:

Osama bin Laden has packed his entire family out of Afghanistan – wives, sons and daughters and their wives, husbands and offspring.

Until Tuesday, November 27, the bin Laden family were still together in Afghanistan. U.S. reconnaissance photos taken in the Tora Bora mountain cave area gave rise to the U.S. intelligence assumption that the Saudi-born terrorist was holed up there.

Bin Laden’s move has more than one key implication for the ongoing war against terror:

• U.S. and British intelligence and special forces, though present on the ground, came short of thwarting the crossing of the large bin Laden clan into Pakistan, although its capture would have been the biggest psychological coup of the war and a priceless intelligence resource.
  
• Bin Laden’s motives. The obvious one was that American military pressure has got him cornered and he wanted his family out of harm's way.
  

Today DEBKAfile adds that a comparison of the dates appearing in the Washington Post story and DEBKAfile's Dec. 8 reports opens up a new question:

Did bin Laden know the U.S. Air Force was about to bomb Tora Bora on Nov. 30 – in time to get his family out of danger?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27270

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