That CIA Had Plans to Kill or Capture Bin Laden Was Public Knowledge.

Today at NRO, Andrew McCarthy comments on the revelation that the CIA was plotting to kill Osama Bin Laden.

Yet the existence of a CIA program to capture or kill Bin Laden was public knowledge. Iraq-War critic Michael Scheuer, who ran the Bin Laden tracking desk at CIA, talked widely about it. Buzz Patterson in his book Dereliction of Duty tells one particularly disturbing story. In 1998 when Bin Laden had been located by the CIA and the US had a 2-hour window to kill him, Sandy Berger was waiting in the Situation Room in the White House for an OK to send a Tomahawk missile to try to kill Bin Laden. But President Clinton was too indecisive to act.

Clinton defended his actions to get Bin Laden, saying in 2002 that during his administration, we trained people to kill Osama:

Now, if you look back – in the hindsight of history, everybody’s got 20/20 vision – the real issue is should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan.

Here’s the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it – no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people.

But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat – maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn’t give us approval. And we would have had to do a refueling stop.

That there was extensive planning within the CIA to capture or kill Osama was so well known that I blogged about it in 2005:

The latest set of lawyers’ restrictions to be alleged grew out of a plan to capture Bin Laden. So great was the lawyers’ concern for Bin Laden’s comfort that a special chair was built to hold him and they were concerned whether the tape used to hold him would hurt his beard. This latest nonsense was revealed by the man who for 10 years headed the CIA’s desk tracking Bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, interviewed by Nora O’Donnell on Hardball. . . .

But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act. . . .

The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.

When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden