Catching bin Laden
A former FBI agent says Janet Reno rejected a plan to arrest Osama bin Laden years before the September 11 attacks. Too bad the terrorist leader wasn't holed up in a house outside of Waco. The revelation that Reno let bin Laden go is, by the way, in addition to the times the Clinton administration was offered bin Laden on a platter and refused to take him. Ah, the halcyon days of the Clinton era. We were so much safer then.

Yeah, right.

Interestingly, the WaPo story I linked to above says this:

Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment of the time, they said, there was no choice but to allow bin Laden to depart Sudan unmolested. "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States," said Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then.

And the ABC News story I linked to above, reporting that Reno rejected a plan to nab bin Laden in 1998, says this:

Starting in early 1996, a team of FBI and CIA agents was secretly sent to an unmarked office in a nondescript building off the Beltway in Alexandria, Va. It was called Alex Station, and it was the center of a U.S. government operation to capture bin Laden. [retired FBI agent Jack Cloonan was one of 13 FBI agents from New York who was part of Alex Station. "We were in the business of trying to find people, track them down," he said.

By early 1998, Alex Station had developed enough information through investigation and informants to get a formal criminal indictment returned against bin Laden, which would still be used if he were captured today.

So, it appears now, having an indictment of bin Laden was prerequisite for arresting bin Laden in 1996 - but in 1998 having an indictment of bin Laden was just a reason to find another excuse to not arrest him. That makes no sense. What does make sense is that maybe the Clinton administration was never really all that serious about fighting terrorism. If they had been, the terrible events of September 11, 2001, might well never have happened.

UPDATE: For what it's worth, NewsMax says it wasn't Reno who let bin Laden get away but her boss, Clinton, who called off a plan in 1998 to bomb the Kandahar house where OBL was said to be staying. Who cares. The Clinton administration let OBL off the hook, repeatedly, and this nation suffered 3,000 deaths on 9/11/2001 because they did.