Josh Marshall's been all over old stories about Bin Laden's getaway in Tora Bora and the Bush rewrite of this particular bit of history. I missed the flack about the latest "October Suprise" in the form of a devastating Monday headline, but am wondering if he doesn't have a head's-up of some kind about something brewing.
Here's some of the stuff he's retrieved from the memory hole:
10/23 at 6:39 a.m.
Look at the lede of this Washington Post article from April 17, 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.
Josh leaves us with this:
More nitty-gritty details reemerging from the Memory Hole about what actually happened at Tora Bora, particularly how clear it is that OBL was there and just how he got away. This from a December 17th, 2001 piece in the Christian Science Monitor.
Choice quote: "Though Mr. Rumsfeld has said that the two dozen or so US Special Forces are helping to block exit routes, that number of US military personnel can only be considered a token of the real figure needed to cut off all the mountain passes surrounding the mountain enclave."
Is anyone going to call them on this hundredth-odd deception on one of the Sunday shows? Tim, Bob, George?
Kerry tries to make what is arguably the biggest screw-up in the war against al Qaida into a centerpiece of the last weeks of the campaign. And what's the Bush campaign's response? Lie about it. Say it never happened.
Fits the MO.