WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Lacking the detailed intelligence information needed to strike directly at Osama bin Laden, Clinton and Bush administration officials fruitlessly sought a diplomatic solution to get the al Qaeda leader out of Afghanistan, a federal panel reported Tuesday.\nNot until the day before the attacks did U.S. officials settle on a strategy to overthrow the Taliban Afghan government in case a final diplomatic push failed. That strategy was expected to take three years, the independent commission investigating the attacks said in one of two preliminary reports.\nSeparately, President Bush said he would have acted more quickly "had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11."\nResponding to criticism in a new book by his former counterterrorism adviser, Bush denied he had ignored bin Laden and the threat of the al Qaeda terror network while focusing on Iraq's Saddam Hussein.\nThe commission report said U.S. officials feared a failed attempt on bin Laden could kill innocents and would only boost bin Laden's prestige. In addition, the American public and Congress would have opposed any large-scale military operations before the Sept. 2001 attacks, the report said.\nIn the end, it said, pursuing diplomacy over military action allowed bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders to elude capture.\nThe panel, formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, presented its findings as it began hearings with top-level Bush and Clinton administration officials. The aim was to question officials on their efforts to stop bin Laden in the years leading up to Sept. 11.\nFormer Defense Secretary William Cohen said the Clinton administration recognized the dangers posed by al Qaeda and considered the United States to be "at war" against the terrorist organization. U.S. officials considered using missile strikes to kill bin Laden three times after August 1998, but each time it was decided the intelligence wasn't good enough to ensure success, he said.\nEarlier, Secretary of State Colin Powell stressed administration efforts to fight terrorism, an implicit rebuttal to criticism in a new book by Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, who is expected to testify Wednesday.\n"President Bush and his entire national security team understood that terrorism had to be among our highest priorities, and it was," Powell said.\nLikewise, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the commission President Clinton and his team "did everything we could, everything we could think of, based on the knowledge we had, to protect our people and disrupt and defeat al Qaeda."
\nThe commission's staff has spent months interviewing Clinton and Bush administration officials and poring over documents. Its preliminary findings will be considered by the 10-member panel, which plans to issue a final report this summer.\n"From the spring of 1997 to September 2001, the U.S. government tried to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden to a country where he could face justice," the report said. "The efforts employed inducements, warnings and sanctions. All these efforts failed."\nShortly before the attacks, the Bush administration was debating how to force bin Laden out. At a Sept. 10, 2001, meeting of second-tier Cabinet officials, officials settled on a three-phase strategy. The first step called for dispatching an envoy to talk to the Taliban. If this failed, diplomatic pressure would be applied and covert funding and support for anti-Taliban fighters would be increased.\nIf both failed, "the deputies agreed that the United States would seek to overthrow the Taliban regime through more direct action," the report said. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said the strategy had a three-year timeframe.\nThe report described Saudi Arabia as "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism," citing lax oversight of charitable donations that may have funded terrorists.\nThe Clinton administration had early indications of terrorist links to bin Laden and future Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as early as 1995 but let years pass as it pursued criminal indictments and diplomatic solutions to subduing them abroad, the commission's report said.\nClarke, who was a holdover from the Clinton administration, said in his book out this week he warned Bush officials in a Jan. 2001 memo about a growing al-Qaida threat after an attack on the USS Cole in Yemen but was put off by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice "gave me the impression she had never heard the term" al-Qaida, Clarke wrote.\nAssociated Press reporter Ken Guggenheim contributed to this report.
