Clinton’s final National Security report doesn’t mention al Qaeda at all and only mentions Bin Laden four times. This needn’t be that damning if the report is sufficiently tough on terrorism. But it doesn’t sound like it. And it certainly doesn’t sound like Clarke’s assurances that terrorism and al Qaeda were an urgent priority. From The Washington Times :
The document boasted of “a dozen terrorist fugitives” who had been captured abroad and handed over to the United States “to answer for their crimes.”
Those perpetrators included the men responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center, which the intelligence community largely thought by late 2000 to be the work of operatives with links to al Qaeda. Listed among those brought to justice was a man who killed two persons outside CIA headquarters in 1993, and “an attack on a Pan Am flight more than 18 years ago.”