Yes, the Clintoids fucked up.

Seriously. Why would anybody expect truth from this gang?

''...one scene singled out for criticism by Democrats -- depicting CIA operatives and Afghan fighters coming close to capturing Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, only for then-national security advisor Samuel Berger to refuse authorization of the mission -- was a "conflation of events." Berger said in a letter to Iger earlier this week that "no such episode ever occurred, nor did anything like it." - Reuters

Mike Scheuer, a senior intelligence officer who led the Bin Laden station for four years during Clinton, is no friend of Bush.  He wrote a book [Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror] that blisters the President's ill advised attack on Iraq.  Those are his opinions.  That said, here are his recollections about what Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton say never happened. ''It is a solution forged by the accumulated bitterness of missed opportunities. In one year under his watch, from May 1998 to May 1999, Scheuer reckons the US had up to a dozen serious chances to kill or capture Bin Laden. Only one was taken - a missile attack on an Afghan training camp in August 1998 - but either the al-Qaeda leader was not there, or he had left before the missiles landed. ''Months earlier, however, Scheuer believes there was a far better opportunity to grab Bin Laden. The CIA had made a deal with a group of Afghan tribesmen to raid Bin Laden's headquarters near Kandahar and then take him to a desert landing strip, where a US plane would take him either to America or another country for trial. The plan, rehearsed several times over many months, was in Scheuer's view "almost a perfect operation in the sense that there was no US hand visible". But on May 29 1998, according to the narrative in the September 11 Commission's report, Scheuer was informed that the operation had been canceled because of the risk of civilian casualties. ''The pattern was repeated on December 20 the same year, when Scheuer's agents were virtually certain that Bin Laden would be staying the night at a guest house in the Kandahar governor's compound. President Clinton's principal national security advisers once more decided that the danger of collateral damage was too high. Afterwards Scheuer wrote to the top CIA agent in the region, Gary Schroen, saying that he had been unable to sleep after this decision. "I'm sure we'll regret not acting last night," he predicted. Yet another opportunity, in Afghanistan, was missed in 1999. ...'' The Guardian In true Clinton style, it comes down to what the meaning of "is" is.