Riveting account in the New York Times of the five year botched attempt by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to deal with al Qaeda before 9/11. As it says, it is a story of 'bureaucratic miscommunication, diplomatic dead ends, military hesitation, intelligence failures, political rivalries and policy miscalculations at the highest levels of two presidential administrations'. There were always lowly intelligence operatives who were convinced a major assault would be made upon the US, although they didn't know where or when, but they were variously ignored or sneered at. As time went on, several attempts were made under Clinton to capture bin Laden but they all screwed up in a vortex of muddle, incompetence, indecision and fear.

But one passage in particular leaps out, in the light of the killing of Sheikh Yassin:

'Mr. Clinton's national security advisers told the commission that Mr. Clinton wanted Mr. bin Laden dead and legal advisers said that under the law, the killing of someone who posed an imminent threat to the country was an act of self-defense, not assassination. But the commission reported that every C.I.A. official interviewed on the subject, including George J. Tenet, the director, said that they believed Mr. bin Laden could only be lawfully killed in one circumstance: if he died in an operation intended to capture him.

'Working-level C.I.A. officers said they were frustrated by what they saw as the policy constraints of having to instruct their assets to mount a capture operation," one commission report said, referring at one point to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance opposition in Afghanistan who was assassinated just days before the Sept. 11 attacks. 'When Northern Alliance leader Massoud was briefed on the carefully worded instructions for him, the briefer recalls that Massoud laughed and said: "You Americans are crazy. You guys never change.'

Have they changed now?