Inventing Reality

Josh Marshall examines the Bush Administration's backtracking on its 2002 admission that Osama Bin Laden was present during the 2001 battle for Tora Bora:



CNN, December 15, 2001:

CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Now, in his bluntest language yet, the U.S. commander-in-charge of the Afghan campaign says al Qaeda fighters are bottled up in a Tora Bora mountainous area, with no access to food or ammunition and no way out. U.S. officials say there's reason to believe Osama bin Laden is in there as well, but they can't be certain.

Washington Post, 4/7/2002:

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



Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan's mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December.



After-action reviews, conducted privately inside and outside the military chain of command, describe the episode as a significant defeat for the United States. A common view among those interviewed outside the U.S. Central Command is that Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the war's operational commander, misjudged the interests of putative Afghan allies and let pass the best chance to capture or kill al Qaeda's leader. Without professing second thoughts about Tora Bora, Franks has changed his approach fundamentally in subsequent battles, using Americans on the ground as first-line combat units.

Freddy Jason Darth Voldemort Cheney, 10/19/2004:

the facts are -- and this issue was addressed just yesterday or the day before by General Tommy Franks. General Franks was the CENTCOM commander; he was the four-star in charge of or operations for that whole part of the globe, including both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was the man in charge of those operations. He was the one who developed and executed the plans that worked in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and he came just within the last 24 or 48 hours and said, it's absolute garbage. It's just not true.

But when you're an empire, you're not bound by consensus reality, right? You can just make shit up, and if you have faith that it is, it is.



What has to happen before Americans realize that this kind of thinking is just insane?