Clinton Admin Pressed Taliban on OBL
Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Newly released State Department documents show that throughout the late 1990s, the Clinton administration desperately tried to persuade the Taliban to expel Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan - in a bid to undo the mistake made by President Clinton in 1996 when he turned down an offer to have bin Laden extradited to the U.S.
According to the Associated Press, the newly declassified documents show that a U.S. diplomat assured a top Taliban official that international sanctions on that country would be lifted if it expelled Osama bin Laden.
In a secret cable to Washington sent in 2000, then-Ambassador William B. Milam detailed his contacts with the Taliban, saying he told the unnamed official: "If the U.S. and the Taliban could get past bin Laden, we would have a different kind of relationship."
Other documents released by the National Security Archive on Thursday chart several years of unsuccessful U.S. attempts to drive bin Laden out of Afghanistan, the AP said.
In 2002, President Clinton admitted he turned down an offer from Sudan to arrest bin Laden and hand him over to the U.S. before he fled the country to Afghanistan:
"I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America," Clinton explained.
"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."
As bin Laden prepared to make the move, the State Department warned that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan -- where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate -- could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum."
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