Somewhere in the annals of this forum a certain member has mentioned an event of very close association to this article.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/19/tal...nts/index.html

Declassified?

I don't believe that the US State Dept. actually declassified anything. Makes things up, yes...declassifies...no.

Well if can embarass the country you can trust the state department to release it. But of course I would view this, not so much as an embarassing situation, but as the last administration doing too little too late.

There are deals in the works all the time for all kinds of things, I would have been surprised if there wasn't a deal being talked about. There is so much behind the scenes talks going on between differant countries for damn near everything. We're just finding out about these talks what 10 year later? I wouldn't be surprised to find out there where all kinds of talks (behind the scenes with Sodamn Insane) before the the Iraqi invasion, there was an above the table deal offered: Leave the country.

If the story's accuracy is to be believed, then the Clinton State Dept. was correct not to close the deal. From what I could see the Taliban offered to let the USA hit UBL, something they (the Taliban conceded they couldn't stop or do anything about)or give them (the Taliban) Cruise missles. Yeah that sounds like a real good deal to me. "Ok since we can't stop you and can do nothing about you launching cruise missles to kill UBL, you give us some of your best weapons so we can do it ourselves." Who the "Hale" did the Taliban have negotiating for them Daryl and his other brother Daryl?

As a follow-up to this, the history channel ran on 9/11 a show tracking all of Clinton's attempts to capture and/or assassinate Osama. The top Afghani leader that was working the hardest finally got himself killed circa 1999, I believe. Anyway, at the time there was a lot of concern that it was illegal to just kill the guy, and the Admin had several "fits and starts" in their attempts because their lawyers would keep trying to stop them. A very interesting show, I can't remember if it was 1 or 2 hours long, as I saw only parts of it. Worth trying to catch again the next time it shows.