Deep down in a Washington Post story today is the news that a top secret report prepared for the Pentagon contends that despite reliable intelligence on “those responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen,” no serious attempt was made to kill or capture the perpetrators.
“It was very, very frustrating,” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, reportedly told the report’s principle author, Richard H. Shultz Jr., of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “We were never instructed to mount a serious operation against bin Laden, never.”