It is a strange world when I have to agree with Islamic insurgents but Bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, is correct on at least one point. The U.S. let the insurgents slip away.
Hamdam told a pair of FBI agents that it was America's fault that the al Qaeda leader is alive.
He stated: ''You had these opportunities, America. You didn't do anything,'' FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan's war-crimes trial.
The U.S. could have killed bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, before he moved to Afghanistan in 1996; we could have killed him after al Qaeda's 1998 U.S. twin bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa; or Bin Laden could have been eliminated after the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, in Aden, Yemen, which left 17 U.S. sailors dead.
Hamdam said: ''bin Laden was emboldened.'' So he struck with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And nearly 3,000 people died.
Hamdam opened up in particular to a Lebanese-born FBI agent named Ali Soufan who was praised as well as an interrogator in Lawrence Wright's, The Looming Tower.
The testimony is chilling and corresponds in rough outline to what key counter-terrorist experts have said in contrast to George Tenet and Louis Freeh's self-serving accounts of fighting al Qaeda.