Albright Defends Clinton's Record on Terrorism

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright today mounted a vigorous defence of the Clinton administration's record on combating terrorism, saying that security forces were given clear orders to assassinate Osama bin Laden following the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya.

Ms Albright, the first in a series of high-profile witnesses to give evidence to federal inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, fended off suggestions that the failure to pursue military action against al-Qaida allowed its operatives to elude capture and continue their terrorist activities.

She said: "President Clinton and his team did everything we could, everything we could think of based on the knowledge we had to protect our people and disrupt and defeat al-Qaida."

Earlier, the inquiry panel presented a preliminary report suggesting that delays by both the Clinton and Bush administrations in acting on intelligence information allowed the terror network to plan and carry out the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

The Clinton administration had intelligence linking Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with terror plots as early as 1995, but years passed as it sought criminal indictments and diplomatic solutions to subduing them abroad.

Bush officials, meanwhile, failed to act immediately on increasing intelligence "chatter" and urgent warnings in early 2001 by counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke to take out al-Qaida targets, according to preliminary findings by the commission reviewing the attacks.

"We found that the CIA and the FBI tended to be careful in discussing the attribution for terrorist attacks," the report said. "The time lag between terrorist act and any definitive attribution grew to months, then years, as the evidence was compiled."

In her opening statement, Ms Albright admitted that the Clinton administration failed to track Bin Laden down, despite a "maddeningly frustrating" international hunt. But she said officials had made it clear to the security services that they had clearance to kill him if they found him.

She said: "The president was prepared to order military action to capture or kill bin Laden. If we had had the predictive intelligence we needed, we would have done so ... and I would have strongly supported that step."

Ms Albright said that the cruise missile strikes ordered by President Clinton against suspected al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan were evidence of the administration's determination to "neutralise" Bin Laden and his network.

"We did not launch the cruise missiles with the purpose of serving legal papers," she told the commission.

But despite a series of forceful military and diplomatic actions around the world in the wake of the embassy bombings, which Ms Albright described as her "worst day as secretary of state", the US government of the day could not stop Bin Laden.

In what appeared to be a thinly-veiled warning to the current administration over its action in Iraq, she warned that the war on terror would fail if the range of targets was too "broad".