11 Commission: Did Clinton Do Enough?

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One source of ambiguity in the Clinton MONs was that they had to be written differently for the various proxy groups the CIA was using to help hunt bin Laden, according to an official familiar with the documents. At the time, proxy groups such as Afghanistan's Northern Alliance were considered the best hope for catching al-Qaeda's leader. But intelligence officials wanted to give some proxies less leeway to kill bin Laden in order to minimize the danger that they might use U.S. power to try to eliminate tribal rivals instead of bin Laden.

Clinton told the 9/11 panel he thought his order to kill bin Laden was unmistakably clear. After all, the Justice Department had ruled that the U.S. government's ban on assassinations didn't apply to bin Laden because he was a military target. Even the commission's chairman is convinced that Clinton wanted to kill bin Laden and that the CIA balked over the slightest ambiguities in his orders: "Some of the people who had to carry that out were part of an agency that had been accused of assassinations in Central America not too long before and who had gotten in deep trouble for that," says Kean. "What [they] wanted [was] all the t's crossed and all the i's dotted."

The most memorable part of Clinton's testimony may turn out to be what he said to his successor. The panel quizzed Clinton in detail about a meeting he had with President-elect Bush during the truncated transition period after the 2000 election. Clinton said he told Bush in that meeting that bin Laden would be his No. 1 national-security problem. Clarke, who recounts this episode in his book Against All Enemies, writes that the incoming Administration found this assessment "rather odd." Commissioners are planning to seek Bush's side of the story. He too will have to explain why bin Laden is not yet dead.

--By John Cloud, with Timothy J. Burger and Viveca Novak/Washington