Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...come out swinging. Tenet acknowledged that the CIA "made mistakes" and warned that it would take an additional five years to rebuild the clandestine service. In what is perhaps the closest anyone in the Bush Administration has come to a formal acknowledgment of responsibility, Tenet said, "We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland, but we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country." But Cofer Black, head of the CIA's clandestine service who holds the storied title of director for operations, was unbowed. "I've heard people say this country wasn...
Earlier this month, Bill Clinton returned to Washington to try to convince the 9/11 commission that as President he did what he could to stop Osama bin Laden. Others who have testified before the commission--particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke--did so before a phalanx of reporters and opponents hoping to see them eviscerated on live TV. But like George W. Bush, who will meet with the commission (together with Dick Cheney) at an undisclosed time, Clinton was allowed to appear in private--in a secret, bugproof room called, in a typical Washington...
...people familiar with the meeting say Clinton told the panel he not only read every scrap of intelligence on the leader of al-Qaeda but became obsessed with bin Laden and wanted him dead after al-Qaeda terrorists bombed U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, murdering 224 people...
...Clinton was so focused on bin Laden, why did he fail so spectacularly in his efforts to catch him? The ex-President told the commission he lacked "actionable intelligence," and a U.S. intelligence official agrees. "We didn't have actionable information about where we knew he would be that we could take him out," the official says. Others suggest the real problem was that Clinton's takedown orders were slathered in legalisms. As the commission's staff members noted in a report, "CIA senior managers, operators and lawyers uniformly said that they read the relevant authorities signed by President Clinton...
...sure, White House aides and CIA managers understood that a mission to capture bin Laden would probably turn into a mission to kill him, given that the jihadist would almost certainly never go quietly. But according to numerous officials, the CIA officers who would be leading the covert operations wanted ironclad, unrestricted language in presidential memos--which are known, rather redundantly, as Memorandums of Notification (MONs)--that killing bin Laden would be legal. (Ever since Iran-contra and other scandals, covert ops have routinely been lawyered in advance.) As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll points...