In an interview a couple of hours ago on WJR-AM 760 in Detroit, Gary Berntsen, a highly decorated CIA field commander who played a key role in Afghanistan after 9/11, didn’t mince words about the demise of Osama bin Laden.
Berntsen said that President Barack Obama did what former president George Bush was unwilling to do.
The former 23-year CIA official – not exactly a category of personnel that is quick to praise Obama – said that the president “pulled out all the stops” in implementing a dangerous raid in Pakistan. Obama urged a detailed mission plan after intelligence reports indicated that bin Laden was holed up in a compound outside of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
In contrast, Berntsen said that when he was a U.S. intelligence commander working near the Tora Bora mountain range in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, reports that bin Laden was within reach of U.S. forces drew a tepid reaction from the Bush administration.
Berntsen’s request for 800 troops from the Army Rangers – a special operations unit – to box in bin Laden at Tora Bora was rejected. If that request had been granted, Berntsen told WJR, it “would have ended the whole thing” just months after the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
Instead, the Bush administration chose to field paid Afghanistan mercenaries at the eastern escape routes from Tora Bora. Many of those Afghans were bought off and bin Laden, his family and his entourage walked into Pakistan, never to be seen again. Until Sunday.
Berntsen, author of the 2005 book “Jawbreaker,” which the CIA tried to suppress because of its criticisms of U.S. efforts to capture or kill Osama, said the tactical approach approved by Obama for Sunday’s raid amounted to a “gut check” time. So many things could have potentially gone wrong with this precarious mission, he said.
Yet, Obama rejected a much safer alternative – heavily bombing the bin Laden compound – because it would have left little or no proof that Osama was dead.
The plan chosen by the president provided video, photographic and DNA evidence that al-Qaida’s chief thug was, in fact, eradicated from the globe.
In addition, Berntsen said, the plan included a “nice touch” by conducting a burial at sea for bin Laden that complied with Islamic religious practices but prevented the creation of an inland Osama monument by jihadists.
