Word: ladens
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...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...
...source of ambiguity in the Clinton MONs was that they had to be written differently for the various proxy groups the CIA was using to help hunt bin Laden, according to an official familiar with the documents. At the time, proxy groups such as Afghanistan's Northern Alliance were considered the best hope for catching al-Qaeda's leader. But intelligence officials wanted to give some proxies less leeway to kill bin Laden in order to minimize the danger that they might use U.S. power to try to eliminate tribal rivals instead of bin Laden...
Clinton told the 9/11 panel he thought his order to kill bin Laden was unmistakably clear. After all, the Justice Department had ruled that the U.S. government's ban on assassinations didn't apply to bin Laden because he was a military target. Even the commission's chairman is convinced that Clinton wanted to kill bin Laden and that the CIA balked over the slightest ambiguities in his orders: "Some of the people who had to carry that out were part of an agency that had been accused of assassinations in Central America not too long before...
...Clinton's testimony may turn out to be what he said to his successor. The panel quizzed Clinton in detail about a meeting he had with President-elect Bush during the truncated transition period after the 2000 election. Clinton said he told Bush in that meeting that bin Laden would be his No. 1 national-security problem. Clarke, who recounts this episode in his book Against All Enemies, writes that the incoming Administration found this assessment "rather odd." Commissioners are planning to seek Bush's side of the story. He too will have to explain why bin Laden...
Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sends a memo to two units at FBI headquarters in Washington and to the New York field office describing 10 foreign students at aviation schools who are under investigation for ties to Sunni extremists. Williams theorizes that bin Laden could be systematically sending students to study aviation in the U.S. and recommends that agents compile a list of such schools, establish contacts with them, discuss his theory with the rest of the intelligence community and obtain background information on foreign students applying to flight schools...