The law at war: How Osama slipped away.

• Author: Wedgwood, Ruth
• Position: Suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden

IN THE SPRING of 1996, the White House was preoccupied with Bosnia--implementing the Dayton Agreement, ferrying American troops across the Sava River, building facilities at Tuzia, attempting to install an unworkable three-headed government in Sarajevo, hoping to persuade Muslim, Croat and Serb factions to let refugees return to their burnt-out homes. Bosnia may have been important to the confidence of Europe and the credibility of NATO-but everything is relative. On the same White House watch, a far more important war was left unattended: We let Osama bin Laden escape our clutches.

Barton Gellman's astonishing account of White House decision-making, featured in the October 3 Washington Post, laid Out a sad Clintonian story of too little, too late. It is a story that bears important lessons for the conduct of the present campaign against terrorism. Well studied, it is a lesson that can teach us to avoid the dangerous confusion between war and peace, and between adjudicative fact-finding and the conduct of a serious foreign and national security policy. It is a lesson that, despite the shock of September 11, we still need to learn.

IN FEBRUARY 1996, Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Othman Taba asked the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum what the Sudanese government could do to redeem its heretofore indulgent record on terrorism. Ambassador Tim Carney and State Department official David Shinn laid out a series of sensible demands, including the expulsion of a group of Egyptian nationals conspiring to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak, and the closure and dismantling of Hamas training facilities that readied young men for Palestinian terrorist operations. At the top of the list, however, was the request to put an end to the swaggering presence in Khartoum of Osama bin Laden, who even then was notorious for bankrolling a number of Islamic terrorist groups around the world.

Indeed, by 1995 there was already compelling evidence that bin Laden was financing and training Egyptian and Algerian Islamist groups. He funded a group called Muhammad's Army (Jaish Muhammad) that was responsible for terror attacks in Jordan. Bin Laden's farm outside Khartoum had been turned into a camp reserved for the use of Hamas in training new recruits. He bankrolled a December 1992 bombing in Aden that killed two tourists and barely missed killing or injuring almost a hundred U.S. servicemen en route to Somalia for famine relief operations. Bin Laden's brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifah, financed Ramzi Yousef in organizing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing designed to topple one of the twin towers upon the other, and funded terrorist groups in the Philippines. In November 1995, a U.S. military training center for the Saudi National Guard based in Riyadh was blown up by a van loaded with explosives, killing five Americans, with the tentacles again leading back to bin Laden's network.

The U.S. government therefore had compelling reasons to pursue negotiations with Sudan over bin Laden's future. These negotiations continued in earnest when Major-General Elfatih Erwa, Sudan's Defense Minister, visited the United States in March 1996. During that visit, Erwa stated that the...