‘Strikes wouldn’t have stopped 9/11’

Rumsfeld and his predecessor William Cohen and Secretary of State Colin Powell and his predecessor Madeleine Albright, were questioned about why they had not taken aggressive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan before Sept. 11.

There were at least four potential opportunities to try to kill bin Laden in Afghanistan from December 1998 to July 1999. Cruise missile strikes were prepared but never approved for fear of civilian casualties and due to doubts that bin Laden would still be there when a missile landed hours later, a commission report said.

Cohen, who was defense secretary under President Clinton, reminded the Commission that when that administration bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 that it believed might help bin Laden acquire chemical arms, it met a lot of public criticism. He said he would do it again. Cohen also said bin Laden had issued a ‘‘fatwa’’ to have him killed.

Powell told the hearing: ‘‘Most of us still thought that the principal threat was outside the country. Anything we might have done against Al Qaeda in this period or against Osama bin Laden may or may not have had any influence on these people who were already in this country, already had their instructions, were already burrowed in and were getting ready to commit the crimes that we saw on 9/11.’’ — (Reuters)