Senate report: Bin Laden was 'within our grasp'

I saw this headline this morning and lamented. The Democrats are ONCE again trying to migrate issues away from our President. The headline was “Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.” WASHINGTON (AP). More importantly this report seeks to blame the current state of the war in Afghanistan on President George W. Bush, Donald Rumfeld, and Tommy Franks.

The current state of the war is the lack of a decision to send in the troops/resources that the commanders in the field have been requesting for the past 80 plus days. Look, I certainly did not agree with a lot of President Bush’s decisions and believe that our wartime efforts could and should have gone better under his leadership. But, one cannot blame the loss of bin Laden on current state of the war, if you do that, you must go back much further than President George W. Bush. You must go back to formal President Clinton for that blame.

The Clinton administration did not take advantage of putting away bin Laden from offers to take him from the Sudan government. At least two offers from the government of Sudan to arrest Osama bin Laden and turn him over to the U.S. were rebuffed by the Clinton’s administration in February and March of 1996, a period of time when the president's attention was distracted “by other matters”. President Clinton has defended not taking bin Laden by saying "At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him.” Well, that’s not true. By 1996, Osama bin Laden had been named as co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by prosecutors in New York (USA v Ali Mohamed, S (7) 98 Cr. 1023 (LBS), Plea Hearing, October 20, 2000).

I think, if the Democrats want to find blame for the current state of the war, they need to look a little closer to home than 8 years ago and get those troops/resources to Afghanistan and lets finish this thing.

Devem