BERGER & THE 9-11 COMMISSION

Below is part of his prepared remarks:

As has been reported, the President gave the CIA broad and lethal authoritiesm regarding bin Laden -- which were unprecedented at the time. Director Tenet and other CIA senior officials -- who were well aware of the priority this commanded -- received the authorities they requested and never expressed dissatisfaction to the President or me as to their scope or meaning. The President’s willingness to destroy Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants was made unmistakably clear in August 1998; the one time we had predictive, actionable intelligence as to bin Laden’s whereabouts, the President ordered roughly 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles fired to kill him. Twenty to thirty al Qaeda lieutenants were killed, according to the intelligence community at the time, but bin Laden was missed by a matter of hours.

Over the next two years, we continually sought to obtain predictive, actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, including developing and successfully testing in late 2000 the unmanned Predator drone – a remarkable surveillance platform. But never again would the predictive intelligence necessary for effective strikes emerge on our watch. And it was our judgment that to fire on primitive camps and fail to destroy bin Laden or key al Qaeda figures would have fortified bin Laden and made the U.S. look weak and feckless. Nonetheless, the President ordered two nuclear submarines to deploy off the coast of Pakistan for additional missile strikes, and was ready to use them at a moment’s notice, had reliable intelligence materialized on bin Laden’s whereabouts.

President Clinton pressed often for military "boots on the ground" options to get bin Laden, and our military looked seriously at the feasibility of a special forces mission. But given the circumstances that prevailed at that time, including no support from Pakistan or other neighbors, no base near Afghanistan and no lead-time intelligence, the military leadership concluded that such a mission would very likely fail. To this day – even after a war against the Taliban and with the benefit of a large-scale U.S. military and intelligence presence on the ground in Afghanistan and the support of Pakistan, bin Laden remains at-large.