It seems the State Department was moving on Bin Laden with the same amount of follow up that was started under Clinton. Evidently the ground work had already been laid before Bush got into office that the Taliban was not serious about giving him up, and it also appears folks in the State Department were missing signals being given. Based on the "Bush was stupid" premise, you have to figure Colin Powell was the one providing follow-up to Bush on the issue and how to proceed. Barring some incredible coup by our intelligence services that had already admitted they did not have the resources to make any significant inroads with "on the ground" assets (for a variety of reasons - not the least of which was cutting of their funding through the 1990s) to get any meaningful intelligence on Bin Laden or others - seriously, it is hard to understand how things could have been any different. The terrorists all started training in the US long BEFORE Bush was elected or even got into office, so it would have been something that should have hit the radar long before that time.
Diplomats Met With Taliban on Bin Laden
Some Contend U.S. Missed Its Chance
http://www.infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/US_met_taliban.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A3483-2001Oct28¬Found=true
Quote
By David B.Ottaway and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 29, 2001; Page A01
Over three years and on as many continents, U.S. officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.
Talks continued until just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.
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"We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities."
U.S. officials struggled to communicate with Muslim clerics unfamiliar with modern diplomacy and distrustful of the Western world, and they failed to take advantage of fractures in the Taliban leadership.
"We never heard what they were trying to say," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.' "
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The diplomatic effort to snare bin Laden began as early as 1996, when officials devised a plan to use back channels to Sudan, one of seven countries on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting states. Under the plan, bin Laden would be arrested in Khartoum and extradited to Saudi Arabia, which would turn him over to the United States.
But the United States could not persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and Sudan instead expelled him to Afghanistan in May 1996 -- a few months before the Taliban seized power in Kabul.
The Clinton administration did not begin seriously pressing the Taliban for bin Laden's expulsion until the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured 4,600.
The bombings were "a seminal moment," changing Washington's view of the Taliban, an administration official said. The attacks convinced U.S. policymakers that Omar was no longer simply interested in conquering Afghanistan, but that his protection was allowing bin Laden, a longtime friend, to engage in terrorist ventures abroad.
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On Feb. 3, 1999, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth, the Clinton administration's point man for talks with the Taliban, and Michael Sheehan, State Department counterterrorism chief, went to Islamabad to deliver a stern message to the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Abdul Jalil: The United States henceforth would hold the Taliban responsible for any terrorist act by bin Laden.
By that time, bin Laden had been indicted for his alleged role in the embassy bombings. The officials reviewed the indictment in detail with the Taliban and offered to provide more evidence if the Taliban sent a delegation to New York. The Taliban did not do so.
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U.N. pressure steadily mounted. In October 1999, a Security Council resolution demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to "appropriate authorities" but left open the possibility he could be tried somewhere besides a U.S. court.
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Throughout 1999 and 2000, Inderfurth, Sheehan and Thomas R. Pickering, then undersecretary of state, continued meeting in Washington, Islamabad, New York and Bonn to review evidence against bin Laden. They warned of war if there were another terrorist attack.
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Even after Sept. 11, as U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes rushed toward Afghanistan, the Taliban's mysterious maneuvering continued.
Bearden, the former CIA administrator, picked up his phone in Reston in early October and dialed a satellite number in Kandahar. Hashimi answered, still full of optimism that Saudi clerics and an upcoming conference of Islamic nations would give their blessing to Bush's demand that they "cough him up."
"There was a 50-50 chance something could happen," Hashimi told Bearden, "if the Saudis stepped in."
Five days later, bin Laden remained at large and the United States began pummeling Kandahar and other Taliban strongholds.
"I have no doubts they wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck," Bearden said of bin Laden. "It never clicked."
If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future? - William Happer Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics Princeton University