http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4540958/

Osama bin Laden: missed opportunities
The CIA had pictures. Why wasn't the al-Qaida leader captured or killed?
By Lisa Myers, NBC News
March 16th, 2004


In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing killed six people.

In 1998, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa killed 224.

Both were the work of al-Qaida and bin Laden, who in 1998 declared holy war
on America, making him arguably the most wanted man in the world.

In 1998, President Clinton announced, "We will use all the means at our
disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long
it takes."

NBC News has obtained, exclusively, extraordinary secret video, shot by the
U.S. government. It illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton
administration had to kill or capture bin Laden. Critics call it a missed
opportunity.

In the fall of 2000, in Afghanistan, unmanned, unarmed spy planes called
Predators flew over known al-Qaida training camps. The pictures that were
transmitted live to CIA headquarters show al-Qaida terrorists firing at
targets, conducting military drills and then scattering on cue through the
desert.

Also, that fall, the Predator captured even more extraordinary pictures - a
tall figure in flowing white robes. Many intelligence analysts believed then
and now it is bin Laden.

Why does U.S. intelligence believe it was bin Laden? NBC showed the video
to William Arkin, a former intelligence officer and now military analyst for
NBC. "You see a tall man.. You see him surrounded by or at least protected
by a group of guards."

Bin Laden is 6 foot 5. The man in the video clearly towers over those
around him and seems to be treated with great deference.

Another clue: The video was shot at Tarnak Farm, the walled compound where
bin Laden is known to live. The layout of the buildings in the Predator
video perfectly matches secret U.S. intelligence photos and diagrams of
Tarnak Farm obtained by NBC.

"It's dynamite. It's putting together all of the pieces, and that doesn't
happen every day.. I guess you could say we've done it once, and this is
it," Arkin added.

The tape proves the Clinton administration was aggressively tracking
al-Qaida a year before 9/11. But that also raises one enormous question: If
the U.S. government had bin Laden and the camps in its sights in real time,
why was no action taken against them?

"We were not prepared to take the military action necessary," said retired
Gen. Wayne Downing, who ran counter-terror efforts for the current Bush
administration and is now an NBC analyst.


"We should have had strike forces prepared to go in and react to this
intelligence, certainly cruise missiles - either air- or sea-launched -
very, very accurate, could have gone in and hit those targets," Downing
added.

Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, says the White House
required the CIA to attempt to capture bin Laden alive, rather than kill
him.

What impact did the wording of the orders have on the CIA's ability to get
bin Laden? "It reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to,
say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him," said
Schroen.

A Democratic member of the 9/11 commission says there was a larger issue:
The Clinton administration treated bin Laden as a law enforcement problem.

Bob Kerry, a former senator and current 9/11 commission member, said, "The
most important thing the Clinton administration could have done would have
been for the president, either himself or by going to Congress, asking for a
congressional declaration to declare war on al-Qaida, a military-political
organization that had declared war on us."

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Looks like the President *did* drop the ball. President Clinton, that is.