re: #20 brookly red

well it was loaded and ready for how many years?

FactCheck.org: Did Bill Clinton pass up a chance to kill Osama bin Laden?

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter. What is not in dispute at all is the fact that, in early 1996, American officials regarded Osama bin Laden as a financier of terrorism and not as a mastermind largely because, at the time, there was no real evidence that bin Laden had harmed American citizens. So even if the Sudanese government really did offer to hand bin Laden over, the U.S. would have had no grounds for detaining him. In fact, the Justice Department did not secure an indictment against bin Laden until 1998 – at which point Clinton did order a cruise missile attack on an al Qaeda camp in an attempt to kill bin Laden.

We have to be careful about engaging in what historians call “Whig history,” which is the practice of assuming that historical figures value exactly the same things that we do today. It’s a fancy term for those “why didn’t someone just shoot Hitler in 1930?” questions that one hears in dorm-room bull sessions. The answer, of course, is that no one knew quite how bad Hitler was in 1930. The same is true of bin Laden in 1996.