Excerpts of the full story linked below are presented minus the spin. :-)

Late breaking story from the NY Times:

Panel Releases Initial Findings on U.S. Efforts Before Attacks
By DAVID STOUT

Published: March 23, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 23 — For more than four years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States tried to render Osama bin Laden powerless through a series of diplomatic moves, a special government panel said today.

Some of the most intense efforts spanned the period from the spring of 1997 to the very eve of the attacks as Washington tried to persuade the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to expel Mr. bin Laden "to a country where he could face justice," the commission said.

"The efforts employed inducements, warnings and sanctions," the independent, bipartisan panel said. "All these efforts failed."

In retrospect, the report says, it probably took longer than it should have for public officials "outside the circle of terrorism specialists" to recognize that the grave dangers posed by terrorists were "much larger than an individual criminal, more than just one man," a reference to Osama bin Laden.

The report affirmed what some terrorism experts have said before — that high-level government officials were slow to realize that terrorists were more than just "criminals" and that, in fact, they were at war with the United States. In other words, going after them is, or should be, more a military action than a police investigation.

Despite its findings, the report is not accusatory in its tone. Indeed, at the onset its authors state that "we are ready to revise our understanding of these topics as our work continues."

The panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, issued its report as it began hearing public testimony from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright, who served in the Clinton administration.

Much of the contents of the report, prepared by the commission's staff, has been known before. But the document offers extensive details that, considering what happened on Sept. 11, amount to a telling narrative on the limits of diplomacy.

The United States pressed two successive Pakistani governments to demand that the Taliban cease sheltering Mr. bin Laden and his group long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the report notes. But before the attacks, "the United States could not find a mix of incentives or pressure that would persuade Pakistan to reconsider its fundamental relationship with the Taliban."