The Senate report said bin Laden and his bodyguards apparently departed Tora Bora on Dec. 16, 2001, adding: "With help from Afghans and Pakistanis who had been paid in advance, the group made its way on foot and horseback across the mountain passes and into Pakistan without encountering any resistance.
"The Special Operations Command history (of the Afghan invasion) noted that there were not enough U.S. troops to prevent the escape, acknowledging that the failure to capture or kill " bin Laden made Tora Bora a controversial battle."
Though excluding those details from his memoir, Bush tries to rebut the criticism that he bungled the battle of Tora Bora. He wrote:
"Years later, critics charged that we allowed bin Laden to slip the noose at Tora Bora. I sure didn't see it that way. I asked our commanders and CIA officials about bin Laden frequently. They were working around the clock to locate him, and they assured me they had the troop levels and resources they needed. If we had ever known for sure where he was, we would have moved heaven and earth to bring him to justice."
The reality, however, was that the neocons, who saw Iraq as a more serious threat to Israel, and the oil men, who lusted after Iraq's petroleum reserves, persuaded Bush to concentrate more on getting rid of Saddam Hussein than Osama bin Laden.
Macho Talk
To do that, some advisers played on Bush's macho self-image. In his memoir, Bush recalled one of his weekly lunches with Vice President Cheney (the former head of the Halliburton oil-drilling company), who was urging him to get on with the business of eliminating Saddam Hussein.
"Dick asked me directly, "Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?' That was his way of saying he thought we had given diplomacy enough time. I appreciated Dick's blunt advice. I told him I wasn't ready to move yet. "Okay, Mr. President, it's your call,' he said."
However, even as he was being prodded by Cheney and the neocons to act, Bush was using similar macho rhetoric about having "the balls" to go to war to ensure that Prime Minister Blair would commit British forces when the time came. In one melodramatic passage in Decision Points, Bush recounts a discussion with Blair:
"We both understood what the decision meant. Once we laid out our position at the UN, we had to be willing to follow through with the consequences. If diplomacy failed, there would be only one option left. "I don't want to go to war,' I told Tony, "but I will do it.'
"Tony agreed. After the meeting, I told Alastair Campbell, one of Tony's top aides, "Your man has got cojones.' I'm not sure how that translated to the refined ears of 10 Downing Street. But to anyone from Texas, its meaning was clear."
But Bush's memoir also has indications that he was not just swept up by the manly excitement of blasting apart some nearly defenseless nation, but he was carried along by intelligence reports which were themselves being manipulated by a combination of Cheney/neocon pressure and CIA analysts who cared more for their jobs than the truth. Bush wrote:
"One intelligence report summarized the problem: "Since the end of inspections in 1998, Saddam has maintained the chemical weapons effort, energized the missile program, made a bigger investment in biological weapons, and has begun to try to move forward in the nuclear area.'"
The Zarqawi Myth
The memoir also contains references in which it's ambiguous whether Bush is the manipulator or the one being manipulated.
For instance, Bush cites the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a brutal terrorist who was operating in an area of Iraq that was protected by the U.S. and British "no-fly zone," which prevented Saddam Hussein's ruthless counter-terror operations from targeting anti-government Islamic militants like Zarqawi.
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