I keep up with the Bin Laden news so you don’t have to; this includes reading the recently published book, “Kill Bin Laden,” authored by the pseudonymous Delta Force commander who was present at Tora Bora in December 2001. Despite all of the pseudonyms and uncertainties about source material, it seems to be a reliable account and it has some interesting bits in it about the battle and about Delta. Overall, however, it does not provide a fundamentally new picture of what happened at the battle. It tracks other accounts in key respects: Osama was there; on December 14th, he was under heavy bombardment and thought he would die; sometime after that, he escaped; the Afghan militias that the United States relied upon did not see the battle as we did and were unreliable, under-motivated partners; and our intelligence about Bin Laden’s movements and inner circle, then and later, was incredibly poor. Delta, at least, had virtually no human sources to work with, and it could not even be sure Bin Laden was alive or dead for long after the battle, never mind figure out where he might be hiding.
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