Bin Laden eager to avoid martyrdom at Tora Bora

AP/Houston Chronicle:

A doctor who treated wounded al-Qaida fighters at Tora Bora in Afghanistan has confirmed Osama bin Laden was at the mountain stronghold as U.S. and Afghan forces attacked — and said the al-Qaida chieftain seemed concerned about only his own welfare.

Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, a doctor from Yemen, told a military panel at Guantanamo Bay that he carried out amputations with a knife and scissors in the caves of Tora Bora during the siege in late 2001 and had to abandon his patients several times when B-52 bombers flew overhead.

Batarfi said he was forced to treat the al-Qaida fighters and was not a terrorist himself. Desperate to escape the bombings, he said he asked to see the commander of forces at Tora Bora because he wanted to learn how to escape. Two weeks later, he was summoned to a meeting — and found himself face-to-face with bin Laden, whom he had met once before in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

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Batarfi said bin Laden was at Tora Bora for only two days and that the al-Qaida leader — who on Friday was seen in a new video — felt he had no way to slip away from approaching U.S. and Afghan forces.

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Batarfi confirmed he met with bin Laden for about 10 minutes.

"He came from behind the trees and I assumed there was a cave nearby that secured his place," Batarfi said. He added that bin Laden would limit meetings to 45 minutes so U.S. forces would be unable to hone in on him and fire a missile.

Batarfi added that only a few poorly armed al-Qaida fighters were present.

"Most of all the total guns in the Tora Bora area was 16 Kalashnikovs and there are 200 people," Batarfi told the Guantanamo military panel, which was weighing whether to release the detainee, in broken English. "He did not prepare himself for Tora Bora and to be frank he didn't care about anyone but himself.

"He came for a day to visit the area and we talked to him and we wanted to leave this area. He said he didn't know where to go himself, and the second day he escaped and was gone."

Since then he has gone on to more discomfort and failure. The stress of losing is written on his face, if not in his rhetoric. He is still a frightened man who is still trying to frighten people into accepting his weird religious beliefs. If he can get Democrats to accept Islam as the price of getting out of Iraq, he will have effectively exposed the perfidies of both. At this point the Democrats are his best hope for survival in Iraq and elsewhere.