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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1177555/posts

Berger rejected four plans to kill or capture bin Laden
THE WASHINGTON TIMES ^ | July 24, 2004 | James G. Lakely

Posted on 07/23/2004 11:12:30 PM PDT by neverdem

President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, rejected four plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, worrying once that if the plans failed and al Qaeda launched a counterattack, "we're blamed."

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.

Mr. Berger's "hand-written notes on the meeting paper," the report says, showed that Mr. Berger was worried about injuring or killing civilians located near the camp.

Additionally, "If [bin Laden] responds" to the attack, "we're blamed," Mr. Berger wrote.

The report also says that Richard Clarke, Mr. Berger's expert on counterterrorism, presented that plan to get bin Laden because he was worried about the al Qaeda leader's "ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

These revelations come as Mr. Berger is under investigation by the Justice Department for smuggling several copies of classified documents that dealt with the Clinton administration's anti-terror policies out of the National Archives.

Commission Co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Thursday, however, that the missing documents Mr. Berger has acknowledged taking doesn't affect "the integrity" of the final report.

According to the report, 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.

The Dems would have been smart to have let this ABC broadcast go by without comment, because now all their complaining has raised the question of just what did the Clinton Admin. do in the years leading up to 9/11.

BTW, this is another example of the negligence of the MSM. If was a reporter and there'd been a Democrat congresswoman screaming into my microphone about how this film is a digusting re-writing of history, as I heard on a radio report last night, I would have asked 1) have you seen the film, and 2) how, specifically, did the film distort the record?