Ellington

Editor & Publisher is reporting: "Today, in a story sent to Knight Ridder newspapers, the bureau examined the current, and perhaps crucial, election debate in the aftermath of the new Osama bin Laden video: Did the U.S. military let the terrorist leader escape in Tora Bora nearly three years ago? [...] The report revealed that two KR reporters and two photographers were at Tora Bora during the battle, and photographer David Gilkey of the Detroit Free Press and reporter Drew Brown traveled there a year later, interviewed Afghan fighters, retraced al-Qaida escape routes and talked to Pakistani intelligence officers who were tracking al Qaida. 'Their reporting,' KR recalled today, 'found that Franks and other top officials ignored warnings from their own and allied military and intelligence officers that the combination of precision bombing, special operations forces and Afghan forces that had driven the Taliban from northern Afghanistan might not work in the heartland of the country's dominant Pashtun tribe.'"

"'While more than 1,200 U.S. Marines sat at an abandoned air base in the desert 80 miles away, Franks and other commanders relied on three Afghan warlords and a small number of American, British and Australian special forces to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from escaping across the mountains into Pakistan.'"

"'Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman, couldn't be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move their troops into place and didn't attack until four days after American planes began bombing -- leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters. [...]

"'U.S. intelligence analysts estimated that 1,000 to 1,100 al-Qaida fighters, along with some of the group's top leaders, escaped the American dragnet at Tora Bora. A Pakistani official later told Knight Ridder that intelligence reports suggested that some 4,000 al-Qaida members escaped and that 50 to 80 top leaders paid Zaman or Ali as much as $40,000 apiece for safe passage out of Tora Bora."

"But the Knight Ridder report did acknowledge that there is no proof that bin Laden was among the escapees. 'It isn't clear, however, whether bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman al Zawahiri, were among them, as Kerry has alleged,' the report concluded. 'Bin Laden was last seen heading out of the Afghan city of Jalalabad toward Tora Bora in a convoy on Nov. 15, 2001. U.S. officials thought they'd heard him on a local radio transmission in Tora Bora in December, but later said they might have been mistaken.'"