Parties trading blame on bin Laden

WASHINGTON -- President Bill Clinton's angry defense of his administration's efforts to eliminate Osama bin Laden has set off a new round of charges about whether Democrats or Republicans are to blame for allowing the Al Qaeda leader to remain a national security threat for more than a decade.

Just five weeks before congressional elections, Democrats have seized on the former president's angry retort, during a television interview Sunday, to accuse the Bush administration of dropping the ball that Clinton handed over , while the GOP insists Clinton's defensiveness on the air proves its contention that he was asleep at the switch.

Clinton ordered the only known US attempt to kill bin Laden, launching a salvo of cruise missiles on an Al Qaeda training camp in August 1998 after the group attacked two US embassies in Africa. But one intelligence official also contends that Clinton had far more chances to take out the world's most wanted terrorist than has President Bush, though that official says Bush ignored warnings about bin Laden until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

``The Bush administration was absolutely negligent for not paying attention in their first eight months in office," said Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden task force from 1995 to 1999 and retired from the agency as a senior Al Qaeda specialist in 2004. ``But fair is fair. Clinton had 10 chances and Bush had none."

In an interview with ``Fox News Sunday" reporter Chris Wallace, Clinton grew visibly irate when asked whether he'd done enough to stop bin Laden. Clinton leaned forward in his chair, jabbed his finger at Wallace, and said he'd done all he could to eliminate the Al Qaeda leader.

``I worked hard to try and kill him," Clinton told Wallace. The former president then demanded to know why the Bush administration hasn't faced such criticism for letting bin Laden get away, declaring, ``I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."

Indeed, the only time US forces apparently knew bin Laden's location while Bush has held office was in December 2001, during a pitched battle in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. Experts and analysts thought the military had bin Laden cornered, but he escaped.

Scheuer recalled numerous occasions in the late 1990s when the United States knew bin Laden's whereabouts and travel routine; the terrorist leader had a higher profile before going underground after the 2001 attacks. However, Scheuer said, Clinton and his top aides -- such as national security adviser Samuel Berger and counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke -- didn't act.

``In May of 1998 and 1999, we had two opportunities to capture him and eight different opportunities to kill him," Scheuer told the Globe yesterday. ``On every one of those occasions, the president or Berger and Clarke turned down the opportunity" to strike.

Reached in Moscow yesterday, Berger quickly took issue with those assertions. ``There were several occasions where the intelligence community would get information, we would go on alert, but it would fizzle," he said. ``There was not really a recommendation from them to proceed. We have thousands of guys in Afghanistan [now] and we still haven't got him. He is an elusive guy."

The White House would have acted, but ``we depended upon what the CIA director brought to us," Berger said. ``There was never an occasion after August [1998] where [CIA director George] Tenet came to us and said, `We have a good shot.' If there was, we would have taken it. We were not afraid to shoot at this guy."

The administrations' actions suggested that Clinton was far more concerned than Bush about the threat bin Laden and Al Qaeda posed before Sept. 11.

Gary Hart , a Democrat and former senator from Colorado who co-chaired a government commission that studied threats to national security in the late 1990s, told the Globe that his commission concluded terrorism was a grave threat to national security ``because of testimony we received from the Clinton administration."

``The principal force in convincing us came from the White House itself," Hart said. ``They were trying to deal with Al Qaeda and bin Laden in Afghanistan and elsewhere."

But the incoming Bush administration made it clear that bin Laden was not a priority, Hart said. By ignoring the warnings -- and shunning assessments from experienced analysts such as Clarke -- it was partially Bush's own fault that he didn't have as many chances as Clinton to get bin Laden before Sept. 11, Hart said.

``That is not going to stimulate a lot of CIA proposals to get bin Laden if the people at the White House don't seem to care about it," Hart said.

Others in the Clinton White House said there was widespread frustration about the inability to locate bin Laden after the 1998 missile strikes failed.

``We kept ships offshore, we had the cruise missiles," said Daniel Benjamin , a member of Clinton's National Security Council and author of ``The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Blueprint for Getting it Right."

``Three times we were on the verge of firing," he said, ``but we did not have the corroborating intelligence. At least twice, Clinton went to the Joint [Chiefs of Staff] and said, `Give me options.' "

Benjamin also noted that Clinton launched a program to arm spy drones in Afghanistan during his last year in office, but the ``Bush administration didn't get it up until after 9/11."

In comparing Clinton's record with that of Bush, Benjamin concluded: ``The difference is between a group that was pushing hard to find the opportunities to get bin Laden or improve their chances, and a team that was talking about a whole new approach but was not pushing very hard."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com