Word: tora
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that day, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called Bush with the bad news while he was in the shower. Experts were almost certain they were hearing the voice of bin Laden for the first time since U.S. agents thought they picked up a radio message from him in Tora Bora almost a year ago. When the President walked into his staff meeting the next morning, a staff member says, "he was very intense." After all, this is a President who keeps a copy of the faces of key al-Qaeda leaders in his desk and crosses them out as they...
...days of the war on terrorism a year ago, made the capture or demise of the al-Qaeda leader essential to victory. In the months since, as the bearded, 6-ft., 5-in. leader managed to elude spy satellites and listening devices, along with the hail of bombs at Tora Bora and the lure of a $27 million bounty, the Administration has downplayed the importance of the man while emphasizing instead the pursuit of his organization. In the meantime, his adherents fled, regrouped, adapted, and launched terrorist attacks in new guises...
...followed leads putting him in a wide variety of places in the Islamic world, from Yemen to Saudi Arabia to Iran. But the trail went cold at the Afghan border with Pakistan in December 2001, when a voice believed to be his was last overheard in Tora Bora. Senior Bush aides admit privately that the month it took to build up forces for the invasion of Afghanistan gave bin Laden and his senior leaders plenty of time to carry out evacuation plans. The military is a lot less keen to confess that it blew its best opportunity...
...poll numbers look soft. "He's practically the only Democrat left standing in North Carolina," says a fund raiser who has considered backing Edwards in 2004. Edwards' Senate peer, Kerry, has fewer problems. He coasted to victory on Tuesday, and his criticism of last year's Tora Bora battle in Afghanistan, which failed to capture Osama bin Laden, and his credentials as a Vietnam War hero give him an edge. Kerry is a ferocious campaigner, and his wife Teresa Heinz is the widow of the late Senate Republican and Heinz ketchup heir John Heinz, giving Kerry access to a considerable...
...machine that can be easily replaced," says a Pentagon official. "If he's gone, it could lead to al-Qaeda crumbling." The Pentagon's best chance to nab bin Laden came last December, when he was thought to be cornered in the craggy valleys of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. The American strategy was to enlist Afghan proxies to search the caves for bin Laden while U.S. warplanes pummeled possible sanctuaries from overhead. The scheme failed miserably. The Afghans were poorly trained and ill equipped and lacked their opponents' to-the-death fighting spirit. Officials with the U.S. military...