Did Tommy Franks deliberately let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora?

We all know that George Bush gave the outgoing CIA Director the Congressional Medal of Freedom because he took the fall for the 16 word Niger uranium reference in the State of the Union speech Bush gave. What act of loyalty to Bush did General Tommy Franks perform to get his?

What about knowingly letting Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora and then covering it up?

Newsweek has the story that the CIA and American high command knew bin Laden was at Tora Bora. This contradicts what Bush and Franks have both told the American public.

the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora - intelligence operatives had tracked him - and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK.

...the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."

Is concealing the intentional inaction of the American high command and allowing bin Laden to escape the reason Tommy Franks got his "Medal of Freedom" from George Bush? If so, he got it for an act of high loyalty to Bush -- and total disloyalty to America and to the victims of 9/11.

Why would they specifically avoid catching bin Laden at Tora Bora? My speculation is that catching him at that time would have taken most of the steam out of Bush's effort to invade Iraq.

Let me make it more clear. Bin Laden captured would have eliminated the opportunity to stampede the American people into the war in Iraq. So Tommy Franks, at Rumsfeld's direction, sat on his hands and let bin Laden escape Tora Bora. His reward for this act of loyalty to George Bush was the Medal of Freedom.

There could have been a deal with bin Laden that in exchange for facilitating his escape, bin Laden would not again directly attack the United States. This would explain both the lack of urgency the Bush administration has demonstrated in protecting the homeland (lack of funding for port security and first responders, for example) and the apparent absence of terrorist activity here. [I offer this as a speculation that fits the publicly known facts and the machiavellian nature of the current administration.]

Whatever the reasons, letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora makes Donald Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks and George Bush all complicit in Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks since then. Those attacks include the ones in Madrid and London. Had the American high command supported the CIA at Tora Bora, those terrorist victims probably would not have died or been injured.

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Commentary and discussion at both Kevin Drum and dKos (by Armando).