...will there be a commission to investigate the 9/11 commission? Maybe we need a commission to investigate Jamie Gorelick her possible connection to 9/11 happening in the first place and then what was her part in suppressing the information about 9/11 that's surfacing now on the NYPOST? How does someone who is pivotal in hampering the DOD from preventing 9/11 end up on the commission investigating the causes of 9/11?
I always wondered why no one lost their government jobs after 9/11.
btw, the online NYPOST is a free sign-up
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/51648.htm
BobB
X
08-11-05, 02:22 PM
It was a joke putting Jamie Gorelick on the commission in the first place. Strange that it's taken so long for any real attention to be paid.
JasonF
08-11-05, 02:50 PM
It was a joke putting Jamie Gorelick on the commission in the first place. Strange that it's taken so long for any real attention to be paid.
It's taken so long? People have been bitching about Gorelick's participation since the Commission was formed. Rightfully so, I might add -- she should have been a witness, not a panelist -- but this isn't new.
X
08-11-05, 02:56 PM
Yes, but now they're realizing it wasn't just a slight political conflict.
Gojira69
08-11-05, 02:57 PM
<snip>this isn't new.
What's new is this:
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/51648.htm
What's new is the info that the cell that Mohammed Ata was operating was going to be dismantled in 2000. What's new is the smoking gun just revealed that lawyers following inter-office memorandum from a white house appointee, rather than American law, refused to allow Ata's group to be taken down.
BobB
Myster X
08-11-05, 03:26 PM
They don't want to go away just yet.
9/11 Commission Wants Atta Claims Pursued
WASHINGTON - Members of the Sept. 11 commission want to know whether defense intelligence officials knew four of the hijackers were part of an al-Qaida cell but failed to tell law enforcement.
Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the now-disbanded commission, said Tuesday that members of the panel could issue a statement by the end of the week after reviewing claims that officials had identified ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers.
"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohamed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."
The commission's report on the terrorist attacks, released last year, traced government mistakes that allowed the hijackers to succeed. Among the problems the commission cited was a lack of coordination across intelligence agencies.
Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), a Pennsylvania Republican who serves as vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" identified the men in 1999.
That's an earlier link to al-Qaida than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta if the information, which Weldon said came from multiple intelligence sources, is true.
A group of 9/11 widows called the September 11th Advocates issued a statement Wednesday saying they were "horrified" to learn that further possible evidence exists, and they are disappointed the 9/11 Commission report is "incomplete and illusory."
"The revelation of this information demands answers that are forthcoming, clear and concise," the statement said. "The 9/11 attacks could have and should have been prevented."
With the 9/11 commission disbanded for a year under provisions of the legislation that created it, some of the panel's members have said congressional committees should investigate Weldon's assertions.
According to Weldon, Able Danger identified Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of a cell the unit code-named "Brooklyn" because of some loose connections to New York City.
Weldon said that in September 2000 Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally, so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.
Weldon did not provide details on how the intelligence officials identified the future hijackers and determined they might be part of a terrorist cell.
Defense Department documents shown to an Associated Press reporter Tuesday said the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 to identify potential al-Qaida operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command. At some point, information provided to the team by the Army's Information Dominance Center pointed to a possible al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, the documents said.
However, because of concerns about pursuing information on "U.S. persons" — a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners admitted to the country for permanent residence — Special Operations Command did not provide the Army information to the FBI. It is unclear whether the Army provided the information to anyone else.
The command instead turned its focus to overseas threats.
The documents provided no information on whether the team identified anyone connected to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.
If the team did identify Atta and the others, it's unclear why the information wasn't forwarded. The prohibition against sharing intelligence on "U.S. persons" should not have applied since they were in the country on visas and did not have permanent resident status.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he was unaware of the intelligence until the latest reports surfaced.
OldDude
08-11-05, 03:57 PM
Now it turns out the commission knew about this but didn't include it. stranger and stranger.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--sept11-hijackers0811aug11,0,887686.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
WASHINGTON -- The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of a U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.
Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.
It did not make it into the final report because the information was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said. The commission has gone out of existence, although individual members of the panel continue to follow closely the Bush administration's progress in implementing their recommendations.
Goldblum
08-11-05, 03:59 PM
I wonder if Sandy Burglar fits into this somehow.
OldDude
08-11-05, 04:03 PM
Or the FOX version:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165414,00.html
'Able Danger' Intel Could Rewrite 9/11 History
Thursday, August 11, 2005
WASHINGTON — The federal commission that probed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks was told twice about "Able Danger," a military intelligence unit that had identified Mohamed Atta and other hijackers a year before the attacks, a congressman close to the investigation said Wednesday.
Rep. Curt Weldon (search), R-Pa., a champion of integrated intelligence-sharing among U.S. agencies, wrote to the former chairman and vice-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission late Wednesday, telling them that their staff had received two briefings on the military intelligence unit — once in October 2003 and again in July 2004.
Weldon said he was upset by suggestions earlier Wednesday by 9/11 panel members that it had been not been given critical information on Able Danger's capabilities and findings.
"The impetus for this letter is my extreme disappointment in the recent, and false, claim of the 9/11 commission staff that the commission was never given access to any information on Able Danger," Weldon wrote to former Chairman Gov. Thomas Kean (search) and Vice-Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton (search). "The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter.
"The commission's refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose," Weldon added.
On Wednesday, a source familiar with the Sept. 11 commission — formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (search) — told FOX News that aides who still had security clearances had gone back to the National Archives outside Washington, D.C., to review notes on Atta and any information the U.S. government had on him and his terror cell before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The source acknowledged that the aides were looking for a memo about a briefing given to four staff members by defense intelligence officials during an overseas trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2003.
Staffers apparently did not recall being told of the Able Danger information at that meeting and wanted to double-check their records.
Former commission spokesman Al Felzenberg told The New York Times in Thursday editions that Atta was mentioned to panel investigators during at least one meeting with a military officer. That briefing came in July 2004, less than two weeks before the commission's final report was issued to the public.
Felzenberg said the information about Atta was considered suspect because it didn't jibe with many other findings. For example, the intelligence officer said Atta was in the United States in late 1999, but travel records confirmed that he did not enter the country until late 2000.
"He wasn't brushed off," Felzenberg told The Times about the military officer's briefing. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing."
But Weldon said that argument was not good enough.
"The 9/11 commission took a very high-profile role in critiquing intelligence agencies that refused to listen to outside information. The commissioners very publicly expressed their disapproval of agencies and departments that would not entertain ideas that did not originate in-house," Weldon wrote in his letter Wednesday night.
"Therefore it is no small irony," Weldon pointed out, "that the commission would in the end prove to be guilty of the very same offense when information of potentially critical importance was brought to its attention."
On Thursday, Weldon told FOX News that the military official, who was under cover when he was in Afghanistan for the October 2003 briefing, is certain he told the staffers about Atta at that time.
The military intelligence officer who attended that meeting with staffers "kept notes of that meeting and will testify under oath that he not only told" the staffers about Able Danger's mission, but about Atta.
Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, told FOX News on Wednesday that if Atta's name had been mentioned in the October 2003 briefing, it would have jumped out at staffers.
He said that the commission did not include the claims by Able Danger in the definitive report of the events leading up to Sept. 11 because it had no "information that the United States government had under surveillance or had any knowledge of Mohamed Atta prior to the attacks.
"It could be a very crucial incident in terms of the lead-up to 9/11. It could reveal flaws in the intelligence sharing or the lack of intelligence that we have not yet focused on," Hamilton said of the military's tracking of Atta and its inability to get domestic intelligence agencies to follow up.
Hamilton told FOX News that the commission team would get to the bottom of the confusion over what the United States knew about Atta and whether it played into the commission's investigation.
"I think the 9/11 commission's obligation at this point is to review our records very, very carefully and make very soon — we hope within the next few days — a complete statement about what happened during our investigation," Hamilton said.
Weldon said that he personally knows five members of the commission and is not attacking the integrity of any of them. He said he discussed the matter with two commissioners who told him they were never briefed about Able Danger.
"I have to ask why. I would hope there was not a deliberate attempt by someone on the 9/11 commission staff to keep this information" from the commissioners, Weldon said, adding "I find no fault right now with the commissioners."
A commission spokesman told FOX News that the panel expected to issue a statement before the end of the week.
Among the most critical facts to be determined, if the information about Atta did exist in 2000, would be who then blocked the intelligence from going to the FBI, which could have tracked down the terror cell.
"Team members believed that the Atta cell in Brooklyn should be subject to closer scrutiny, but somewhere along the food chain of administration bureaucrats and lawyers, a decision was made in late 2000 against passing the information to the FBI," Weldon wrote.
"Fear of tarnishing the commission's legacy cannot be allowed to override the truth. The American people are counting on you not to 'go native' by succumbing to the very temptations your commission was assembled to indict," he added
Gojira69
08-11-05, 04:07 PM
Now it turns out the commission knew about this but didn't include it. stranger and stranger.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--sept11-hijackers0811aug11,0,887686.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork
"...Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting..."
I hope Sandy Berger returned the documents in question.
Now it turns out the commission knew about this but didn't include it. stranger and stranger.Not so strange...
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission, said Ms. Gorelick's recusal applies to the time she was deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, so she is free to take part in the investigation and drafting of the report for anything that happened after she left. That, he said, includes the legal barrier known as "the wall," which prevented the sharing of information between law-enforcement and intelligence officials. "The wall as it existed after she left, the wall as it existed in the beginning of the Bush administration, she's perfectly free to ask questions about," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Gojira69
08-11-05, 04:49 PM
Not so strange...
"Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission, said Ms. Gorelick's recusal applies to the time she was deputy attorney general at the Justice Department, so she is free to take part in the investigation and drafting of the report for anything that happened after she left. That, he said, includes the legal barrier known as "the wall," which prevented the sharing of information between law-enforcement and intelligence officials. "The wall as it existed after she left, the wall as it existed in the beginning of the Bush administration, she's perfectly free to ask questions about," Mr. Felzenberg said."
Yes. Not strange at all. I would ALSO want to be on any panel whose purpose was to expose problems and policies which led to Ata's free passage in the US if I had been responsible for those policies. Especially if policies I enforced were against US law and led to the murder of 3,000 people. Its not strange at all. I would want to be on the panel because then I could have my staff bury info, spike testimonies and generally divert the panel from noticing my fingerprints were all over the stuff.
Then, if I were Jamie, I'd go have Berger for dinner.
X
08-11-05, 05:15 PM
And you know who selected Ms. Gorelick to replace Webb Hubbell (he had a little prison time to do) in the Justice Department, don't you?
classicman2
08-11-05, 05:24 PM
That's all we need - a commission to investigate the commission that we should never have had in the first place. :rolleyes:
Thor Simpson
08-11-05, 06:10 PM
That's all we need - a commission to investigate the commission that we should never have had in the first place. :rolleyes:
Someone had better look into this commissioning business. I say we form a commission to decide who would be right for the job and who screwed up in the formation of this commission. Commissioner?
OldDude
08-11-05, 06:11 PM
"The wall as it existed after she left, the wall as it existed in the beginning of the Bush administration, she's perfectly free to ask questions about," Mr. Felzenberg said. ]
How about the wall as it existed under Clinton, who was President at the time, and whose policies would have remainded in place until explicitly overturned by Bush?
DVD Polizei
08-11-05, 06:29 PM
I thought it was perfectly clear the US government knew about the cell, and just didn't act--which is SOP for the US government, so I wasn't shocked by it. So many other threats--valid ones--are known every day. It's just a matter of choosing which one to concentrate on.
OldDude
08-11-05, 07:02 PM
I thought it was perfectly clear the US government knew about the cell, and just didn't act--which is SOP for the US government, so I wasn't shocked by it. So many other threats--valid ones--are known every day. It's just a matter of choosing which one to concentrate on.
The part that knew (the military) is not permitted to act (domestically), and that's probably good. More disturbing is the claim that policies forbade them to tell law enforcement, who could have acted, how those policies came to be, whether those policies ever should have been allowed, and whether they are changed, and info sharing is effective instead of forbidden.
Ineffective sharing through incompetence would be disturbing enough, but being forbidden (or believing you were) to share this info is a major bombshell, and could be argued to be the "cause" of 9/11. Equally disturbing is that the Commission charged with "solving" the problem chose not to look into it.
OldDude
08-12-05, 09:13 AM
The "liberal press" doesn't like this story any more. The story is buried in their websites and can be found with a search engine, but no more links from the front page. The conservative press loves it though. :lol:
If you use your magic tunnel vision to avoid seeing the exact problem that needs to be fixed, it probably won't be. Although our intelligence community may well be incompetent and themselves unwilling to share info, forbidding them to by policy certainly has to be considered a contributing factor. Just amazing how they ignored this.
An Investors Business Daily editorial:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&view=1
Issues & Insights
Atta Boy, Democrats
Published on Friday, August 12, 2005
National Security: The knowledge that Mohammed Atta was affiliated with al-Qaida was known at least a year before Sept. 11, but political correctness and walls between agencies built by Democrats kept it a secret.
It was Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who first announced in a floor speech in June that a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" had tagged Atta in 1999. But his remarks attracted little attention, unlike the media feeding frenzy over a presidential daily briefing that allegedly warned President Bush of an imminent attack.
"Two weeks after 9-11, my friends from the Army's information dominance center, in cooperation with special ops, brought me a chart," Weldon said. "What's interesting in this chart of al-Qaida is the name of the leader of the New York cell. And the name is very familiar to the American people. That name is Mohammed Atta."
Weldon's remarks came at the end of the legislative day during a period known under House rules as "special orders." It resurfaced Monday and hit the fan in a story by the bimonthly Government Security News, which covers national security issues.
Three other hijackers — Marwan al-Shehi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — were also tagged as al-Qaida operatives. In September 2000, the unit recommended that the information on the hijackers be passed on to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists," Weldon told The Associated Press.
But Pentagon lawyers vetoed the idea because Atta and his brethren at the time were here legally. Weldon noted: "They put stickies on the face of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed, and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here on a green card."
Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9-11 commission, said the commission "did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9-11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell . . . Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."
But they did learn of it. The New York Times reports that the 9-11 commission staff had the Able Danger data but decided not to share it with the panel members because the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.
Commission staffers plan a trip to the National Archives to retrieve their notes on Able Danger's findings. Yes, the same National Archives where Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught stuffing classified documents about terrorist threats down his pants, presumably to remove them from public scrutiny.
And this is the same commission that included one Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department. She's also architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making "connecting the dots" before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.
Gorelick was the author of a 1995 memo that helped establish what former Attorney General John Ashcroft testified was the "single greatest structural cause" for 9-11, which was "the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents."
"Government erected this wall," said Ashcroft. "Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall." The hiding of the data on Able Danger is, all in all, just another brick in that wall.
Maybe Oliver Stone can fit all this into his new movie on 9-11. Maybe the focus will shift from how George Bush could have prevented 9-11 in his eight months in office to what Bill Clinton failed to do in eight years. All this happened on his watch.
And maybe, just maybe, the whiners who fight — on fears that swat teams will descend on public libraries — renewal of the Patriot Act to prevent the next Atta from flying a plane into a building, will just shut up, let us collect the dots and connect them.
nemein
08-12-05, 09:22 AM
And maybe, just maybe, the whiners who fight — on fears that swat teams will descend on public libraries — renewal of the Patriot Act to prevent the next Atta from flying a plane into a building, will just shut up, let us collect the dots and connect them.
:lol: yeah... right. That's highly unlikely.
Myster X
08-13-05, 01:58 AM
I wonder what impact will this have Richard Clarke's creditability, if he had one to begin with.
DVD Polizei
08-13-05, 03:06 AM
Regardless of the 911 Commission's failures on some issues, the report was very informative, not of the terrorists, but of the US Government's failure in Intel and communication.
If you ask me the 911 Commission didn't need to investigate these other issues because they already proved the US Government has serious failures in national security.
OldDude
08-13-05, 07:44 AM
But isn't the point to fix the issues, and doesn't that require a precise understanding of exactly what caused the issue, and the difference that fixing it could make?
Avoiding 9/1 would have been a winner in my view. Avoiding the next one still is.
Simply saying the government is fucked up does remarkably little to fix the problem.
DVD Polizei
08-13-05, 02:54 PM
Simply saying the government is fucked up does remarkably little to fix the problem.
I totally agree. But how many times have reports basically said the same.
If you want change, you have to actually fire people, not just transfer them to another job they can fuck up. You know as well as I do, hardly anyone gets fired from a US Government job. And if something really terrible happens? Oh well, let's just create a commission, make a speech in front of them, and then leave and get on with our stupidity once again.
A very interesting memo from former US Attorney for Manhattan Mary Jo White apparently escaped being smuggled out of the National Archives in Sandy Burglar's pants. It turns out that White, who aggresively prosecutor terrorists responsible for the first WTC attack, told Jamie Gorelick that the infamous wall she built between intelligence and criminal justice would lead to disaster.
"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.
"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."
She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."
In fact, the memo made it to the 9-11 Commission, but nobody took much note of it. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to have a person implicated in the memo sitting on the Commission. Conflict of interest is obvious here.
We are now into cover-up territory. And it is a huge story. The 9-11 Commission was charged with a responsibility of utmost seriousnes. Instead of resporting honestly on the problems which led to the 9-11 plotters remaining unmolested by those charged with protecting us, the Commission ignored serious evidence of a major flaw.
Remember that we undertook a huge reorganization of government based ont he recommendations of the Commission. Recommendations that were inherently flawed because of a cover-up of as yet unknown dimensions.
The media Democrats will have no interest in pursuing the story, of course, because it implicates the entire Clinton Administration, highlighting its fundamental unseriousness about the terror threat. But they won't be able to bottle-up the story. It is far too juicy. By downplaying the story, they are slitting their own throats, losing audience and convincing more people that they are not to be trusted.
The average voter is worried about terror, and remains deeply offended by the atack. Decades of media obsession with Watergate have tauight us all the cover-up scandals are fascinating and important. And the mascot of the whole affair, portly Sandy Berger with documents stuffed in his pants, is just far too funny an image to be ignored.
Thomas Lifson 8 17 05
Must have missed taking that out of the archives.
DVD Polizei
08-17-05, 11:16 AM
The media Democrats will have no interest in pursuing the story, of course, because it implicates the entire Clinton Administration, highlighting its fundamental unseriousness about the terror threat. But they won't be able to bottle-up the story. It is far too juicy. By downplaying the story, they are slitting their own throats, losing audience and convincing more people that they are not to be trusted.
Well, this article just lost all validation from me.
nemein
08-17-05, 11:32 AM
Well, this article just lost all validation from me.
Because after all people have no right to express an opinion in a commentary :up:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.
In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.
The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.
Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.
Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."
The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over Mr. bin Laden. But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of Mr. bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater national security threat.
Several former senior officials in the Clinton administration did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on the newly declassified documents.
Adam Ereli, a spokesman for the State Department, said the documents should be viewed in the context of what was happening globally in 1996, rather than in the hindsight of events after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In 1996, Mr. Ereli said, "the question was getting him out of Sudan."
"The priority was to deny him safe haven, period, and to disrupt his activities any way you could," he continued. "There was a lot we didn't know, and the priority was to keep him on the run, keep him on guard, and try to maximize the opportunities to nail him."
Before the East Africa bombings in 1998, however, Mr. bin Laden "wasn't recognized then as the threat he is now," Mr. Ereli said. "Yes, he was a bad guy, he was a threat, but he was one of many, and by no means of the prominence that he later came to be."
The State Department assessment, written July 18, 1996, after Mr. bin Laden had been expelled from Sudan and was thought to be relocating to Afghanistan, said Afghanistan would make an "ideal haven" for Mr. bin Laden to run his financial networks and attract support from radicalized Muslims. Moreover, his wealth, his personal plane and many passports "allow him considerable freedom to travel with little fear of being intercepted or tracked," and his public statements suggested an "emboldened" man capable of "increased terrorism," the assessment said.
While a strategy of keeping Mr. bin Laden on the run could "inconvenience" him, the assessment said, "even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost world-wide."
Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the declassified material released to his group "says to me that the Clinton administration knew the broad outlines in 1996 of bin Laden's capabilities and his intent, and unfortunately, almost nothing was done about it."
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, was highly critical of President Clinton during his two terms in office. The group has also been critical of some Bush administration actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, releasing documents in March that detailed government efforts to facilitate flights out of the United States for dozens of well-connected Saudis just days after the attacks.
Michael F. Scheuer, who from 1996 to 1999 led the Central Intelligence Agency unit that tracked Mr. bin Laden, said the State Department documents reflected a keen awareness of the danger posed by Mr. bin Laden's relocation.
"The analytical side of the State Department had it exactly right - that's genius analysis," he said in an interview when told of the declassified documents. But Mr. Scheuer, who wrote a book in 2004 titled "Imperial Hubris," under the pseudonym "Anonymous," that was highly critical of American counterterrorism strategies, said many officials in the C.I.A.'s operational side thought they would have a better chance to kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan than they did in Sudan because the Sudan government protected him.
"The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him," Mr. Scheuer said. "But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility - he was there and we didn't do anything."
Buy: