Reply #7: Actually it was more than 10 years

[rabs]

Bill Clinton tried to kill OBL on Aug. 20, 1998 when he ordered cruise missiles fired at a compound near Khost, Afghanistan. OBL was not there. The same day cruise missiles struck a pharma plant linked to OBL in Khartoum, Sudan.

Clinton had been trying to off OBL since 1996, after al Qaida was connected to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

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Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.

Within days of the August 1998 embassy bombings, the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency pinned responsibility on bin Laden's organization.

With only Attorney General Janet Reno dissenting, Clinton directed two retaliatory strikes on Aug. 20. One, near the Afghan town of Khost, was timed to kill bin Laden and his associates in their beds at 10 p.m. local time. It missed, the CIA said afterward, by a few hours. The other demolished a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that the CIA had linked to attempted production of chemical weapons for bin Laden.

Domestically and globally, Clinton National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lamented recently, the missile attack came to be regarded -- wrongly, they argued -- "as the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton presidency." Apart from the "public relations battering," Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's deputy counterterrorism chief at the time, wrote later, the episode inflicted a "broader blow . . . on the perceived integrity of U.S. intelligence and U.S. counterterrorist efforts generally."

From Washington Post, Wednesday, December 19, 2001, longish article but interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A62725-2001Dec18