Sunday, July 25, 2004
 WASHINGTON TIMES July 24, 2004:President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, rejected four plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden...
According to the September 11 commission's 567-page report, released Thursday, Mr. Berger was told in June 1999 that U.S. intelligence agents were confident about bin Laden's presence in a terrorist training camp called Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan...
Richard Clarke, Mr. Berger's expert on counterterrorism, presented that plan to get bin Laden...
The first plan of action against bin Laden presented to Mr. Berger was a briefing by CIA Director George J. Tenet on May 1, 1998. Mr. Berger took no action, the report says, because he was "focused most" on legal questions.
"[Mr. Berger] worried that the hard evidence against bin Laden was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted," the report says.
Mr. Clarke asked Mr. Berger: "Should we pre-empt by attacking [bin Laden's] facilities?"
Mr. Berger decided against it...
Another opportunity to strike at bin Laden occurred on Dec. 4, 1999, according to the report, when Mr. Clarke suggested carrying out an attack on an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the last week of the year.
"In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion," the report states in a footnote, "Berger wrote, 'no.'"
[...]
The commission's report also notes a speech that Mr. Clinton gave to the Long Island Association on Feb. 15, 2002, in which — in the answer to a query from a member of the audience — he said that Sudan offered to turn over bin Laden to U.S. custody, but Mr. Clinton refused because "there was no indictment" in hand.
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