Remember how tough officials from the Clinton administration claimed to be about getting Osama bin Laden?

Albright told the 9/11 commission the Clinton administration did everything it could to defeat al-Qaeda and would have killed Osama bin Laden if officials had better intelligence. “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-Qaeda,” Albright said.

Then again… maybe not so much.

# U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet “by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created.”

# The CIA’s analysis of al-Qaida before Sept. 2001 was lacking. No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993, and no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled. “A number of important issues were covered insufficiently or not at all,” the report found.

And we’ll still never know just what classified information Sandy Berger stole and destroyed to protect Clinton administration officials…

Of course, President Bush also bears some blame here… for keeping holdovers like George Tenet from a do-nothing administration.

hat tip: Bryan