Maybe the torture is to shut them up

A safe five months after the election comes news that John Kerry was right in one of his central accusations about Dubya's mishandling of the Afghan War -- that because of inadequate troop levels, Osama was able to escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. We had noted Dick Cheney's incoherent but confidently asserted denial of the claim, and Dubya's team got a few news cycles of their favourite tactic -- ridicule -- out of similar denials. Consider for instance the related output of their puppets at the Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal site:

Tora Bora Baloney
John Kerry tells fish stories about Osama bin Laden.

BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Thursday, October 14, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

As John Kerry tells it, Tora Bora is the place where President Bush let Osama bin Laden get away. In the candidate's oft-repeated formulation, the al Qaeda leader was "surrounded" and escaped only because the president "outsourced" the job of capturing him to Afghan warlords.

Well, that's not the way the battle's commanders remember it. [General Tommy Franks being the key source for later claims] ...

Anyway, it turns out that some of the most useful Gitmo revelations are ones the administration didn't want to get out:

A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a commander for Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped the al-Qaida leader escape his mountain hide-out at Tora Bora in 2001, according to a U.S. government document.

The document, provided to The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information request, says the unidentified detainee "assisted in the escape of Osama bin Laden from Tora Bora." It is the first definitive statement from the Pentagon that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and evaded U.S. pursuers.

Given the time that Freedom of Information requests take to process, this is information that must or should have been known to Bush, Cheney, and Franks, when they made their denials. What was it Bill Clinton lied about again?

UPDATE: Pertinent link to Brad DeLong.

FURTHER UPDATE: The evidence of lies by Bush and Franks continues to come in. In a NY Times article seemingly lost in the papal frenzy, the senior German intelligence official provides, matter-of-factly, the Kerry version of events:

The head of the German intelligence agency, in an interview published here Tuesday [April 12], said Osama bin Laden had been able to elude capture after the American invasion of Afghanistan by paying bribes to the Afghan militias delegated the task of finding him.

"The principal mistake was made already in 2001, when one wanted bin Laden to be apprehended by the Afghan militias in Tora Bora," the intelligence official, August Hanning, said in an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

"There, bin Laden could buy himself free with a lot of money," Mr. Hanning said ...

In his interview, Mr. Hanning was critical of [relying on local militias] as it applied to the goal of capturing or killing Mr. bin Laden, who, he said, was able to insulate himself inside a protective network of supporters after the early efforts to arrest or kill him failed.