What really happened at Tora-Bora?

According to former CIA man Larry Johnson, the Bush administration will have to withstand a new controversy: Why did American forces fail to capture Osama Bin Laden?

The CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, has finally got approval to publish his book, which will hit the streets on December 27, 2005... Bernsten's key point in the book is his testimony that he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Al Qaeda and Taliban members.

From a Newsweek overview of Berntsen's book:

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. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

Roughly 1500-2000 warriors accompanied Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora until he made his escape, walking over snow-covered trails to a new hideout in a lawless area of Pakistan. The actual date of the escape remains disputed: Some sources state November 29, 2001, while the most recent NYT account gives the date of December 19. (I presume Berntsen will help us here.)

At the very same time, according to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, the Cheney administration (may we use that term?) tasked Franks with creating detailed plans for an invasion of Iraq. Iraq took precedence. Franks was so distracted by this new undertaking that he could devote little time to the capture Bin Laden.

Or so runs the least embarrassing scenario. Some have posited a more disturbing idea: A faction within this administration intentionally allowed Bin Laden to get away.

Preposterous? Maybe. But consider: Before the escape, we sent only 36 Special Forces operatives to capture Bin Laden and his 1500-2000 loyalists. (Or so ran previously published reports; again, I presume that Berntsen will increase our understanding.) Now, I'm sure those 36 Special Forces lads were the best of the best -- but nobody's good enough to beat those odds.

4000 Marines stood nearby, and their commander, Brig. Gen. James Mattis, ached to join the fight to get Bin Laden. His request was denied.

Mattis, along with another officer with whom I spoke, was convinced that with these numbers he could have surrounded and sealed off bin Laden's lair, as well as deployed troops to the most sensitive portions of the largely unpatrolled border with Pakistan. He argued strongly that he should be permitted to proceed to the Tora Bora caves. The general was turned down. An American intelligence official told me that the Bush administration later concluded that the refusal of Centcom to dispatch the marines - along with their failure to commit U.S. ground forces to Afghanistan generally - was the gravest error of the war.

It gets worse.

At this same time -- November, 2001 -- the administration received word from MI6 that Pakistani scientists had sold nuclear secrets to Bin Laden. DCI George Tenet flew to Pakistan and got into a screaming match with the head of ISI (Pakistan's intelligence service). Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a key figure in the development of the Pakistani bomb, was interrogated at the American embassy.

One would think that the ultimate nightmare scenario -- a nuke-equipped Osama Bin Laden -- would have made his capture the, and I mean THE number-one priority. So why didn't the administration call in the Marines?

This scandal could -- should -- be massive.