State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.
In what would prove a prescient warning, the analysts said in a top-secret assessment that summer that bin Laden's "prolonged stay in Afghanistan could prove more dangerous to US interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.
Hundreds of "Arab mujahedeen" receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate in Afghanistan, the report noted.
The declassified documents were obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and were provided to the New York Times.
The documents shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.
Before 1996, bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind.
But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the US, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including his part in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 US soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
Two years after the State Department's warning, with bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, al-Qaeda struck two US embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military efforts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan.
Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.
Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by bin Laden in the mid-1990s while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure.
But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."
The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over bin Laden. But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater threat.
Several former senior officials in the Clinton administration did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on the newly declassified documents.
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