http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/2020/predator030624.htmlMissed OpportunityOfficials: Bush Administration Was Slow to Approve Drones to Kill Bin Laden
By Ted Bridis and John SolomonThe Associated Press
W A S H I N G T O N, June 24 — When President Bush took office in January 2001, the White House was told that Predator drones had recently spotted Osama bin Laden as many as three times and officials were urged to arm the unmanned planes with missiles to kill the al Qaeda leader.
But the administration failed to get drones back into the Afghan skies until after the Sept. 11 attacks later that year, current and former U.S. officials say. Top administration officials discussed the mission to kill bin Laden as late as one week before the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, but they had not yet resolved a debate over whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate the armed Predators and whether the missiles would be sufficiently lethal, officials told The Associated Press. In the month before that meeting, the Pentagon and CIA successfully tested an armed Predator on at least three occasions — including once when it destroyed a mockup home resembling an Afghan structure bin Laden supposedly used, the officials said. An Important Role in the War on Terror The disappearance in 2001 of U.S. Predators from the skies over Afghanistan is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days — and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror. In November 2001, a drone helped confirm a high-level al Qaeda meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.
Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information. Two former national security aides also cite some of the discussion inside the Bush White House in a recent book they published on terrorism. The officials said that within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000. The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al Qaeda after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.
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...Officials said they planned to put the drones back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided. Of 11 successful Predator flights sent across the mountains from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in September and October 2000, three spotted a person that several U.S. intelligence analysts concluded was bin Laden.<snip>
...Targeting bin Laden was legally permitted under secret orders and presidential findings that Clinton had signed. Officials at the Sept. 4 meeting put off recommending the armed drone as a solution. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, including re-arming the rebel Northern Alliance. Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.
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