By David B.Ottaway and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 29, 2001; Page A01

Over three years and on as many continents, U.S. officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.

Talks continued until just days before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.

Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the U.S. justice system. It also remained murky whether the Taliban envoys, representing at least one division of the fractious Islamic movement, could actually deliver on their promises.

In interviews, U.S. participants and sources close to the Taliban discussed the exchanges in detail and debated whether the State Department should have been more flexible in its hard-line stance. Earlier this month, President Bush summarily rejected another Taliban offer to give up bin Laden to a neutral third country. "We know he's guilty. Turn him over," Bush said.

"We were not serious about the whole thing, not only this administration but the previous one," said Richard Hrair Dekmejian, an expert in Islamic fundamentalism and author at the University of Southern California. "We did not engage these people creatively. There were missed opportunities."

"We never heard what they were trying to say," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief who oversaw U.S. covert operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s. "We had no common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up.' "

The diplomatic effort to snare bin Laden began as early as 1996, when officials devised a plan to use back channels to Sudan, one of seven countries on the U.S. list of terrorist-supporting states. Under the plan, bin Laden would be arrested in Khartoum and extradited to Saudi Arabia, which would turn him over to the United States.

The Clinton administration did not begin seriously pressing the Taliban for bin Laden's expulsion until the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured 4,600.

U.S. officials launched a two-pronged policy to pressure the Taliban into handing over bin Laden. On the one hand, the United States used the United Nations and the threat of sanctions. On the other, it began a hard-nosed dialogue.

They wanted to get rid of him. He was a pain in the neck," Bearden said of bin Laden. "It never clicked."

Staff writers Gilbert M. Gaul, Mary Pat Flaherty and James V. Grimaldi and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

While listening to your show this morning where you interviewed the blogger about the US justification to invade and fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, I was aghast that you did not state the following. The Taliban offered to hand over OBL to Bush if he could give them evidence that OBL committed the 9/11 attack. Bush never did. In fact, the Taliban offered to extradite him to a third country pending investigation which also was refused. The Taliban and AQ were political opponents at the time; Taliban kept them bottled up so they could not interfer in their business. Secondly, OBL's first response (lengthy and bona fide) to the 911 attack was regret and compassion for the victims and DENIED involvement in the attack; he suggested that state players were behind the attack and listed some possible perpetrators. I am sorry you didn't take the opportunity to set the record straight on this matter. Google OBL's first response to the WTC attack for full text... Let's present the listener with the real facts behind the US invasion of Afghanistan please...not the revisionist version. Don 't forget that the largest crime scene in US history was sanitized ASAP following the attack...in full view of tthe world. I would also direct you to the Dr. Paul Craig Roberts article on the circumstances which recently posted on globalresearch.ca.