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Sandy vetoed attacks on bin laden { July 24 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/27894.htmhttp://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/27894.htm
SANDY 'BURGLAR' VETOED ATTACKS ON BIN LADEN
By DEBORAH ORIN
July 24, 2004 -- Time after time in the Clinton years, then-National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was reluctant to approve military strikes against Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda, according to the 9/11 commission report.
That revelation comes as Berger faces the "Socks-Docs" criminal investigation into whether he illegally snuck top-secret documents out of the National Archives in his socks while vetting material for the 9/11 Commission.
Berger stepped down as a foreign-policy adviser to Democrat John Kerry last week due to the criminal probe — but Republicans have begun pointing to Berger's views as a way to question Kerry's judgment on national-security issues.
The 9/11 report says that in August 2000, Berger was sent a memo outlining a plan for attacking bin Laden in Afghanistan using aerial surveillance from the promising Predator drone — but Berger wouldn't consider it.
In the memo's margin, Berger wrote emphatically: "I will want MORE than verified location. We will need, at least, data on PATTERN of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place," the report says.
On Nov. 25, 2000, amid growing reports that the bombing of the USS Cole was linked to al Qaeda — but not necessarily bin Laden — Berger said blaming al Qaeda was "an unproven assumption," the report says.
On Dec. 4, 1999, then-counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke sent Berger a memo suggesting a strike against the al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan that, it later turned out, helped ready terrorists for 9/11, and again he nixed it.
The report simply says that the plan wasn't approved — buried in a footnote is the fact that in the margin next to Clarke's proposal, Berger wrote a flat: "No."
In another instance back in 1998, the report says that Berger's prime concern over a detailed plan to capture bin Laden was legalistic questions of what to do with bin Laden if it did.
"In his meeting with [CIA Director] George Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with bin Laden if he were actually captured," the report says.
"He worried that the hard evidence against bin Laden was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted."
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