Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Threat of US strikes passed to Taliban weeks before NY attack: "Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan"

And all of this discussion about the Summer of 2001 has reminded me of some articles that came out immediately after Sept. 11 which were speculating on the nature of some meetings that took place between taliban and US, russian, pakistani and iranian ambassadors. the early story in the guardian claimed that the impetus for the early July meeting was to get the taliban to turn over bin laden. the threat was, basically, turn him over or we're coming after you (keep in mind, this is Mid-July).

Later discussions (e.g.) from even less "legitimate" sources, claim that the actual impetus was actually to get the pipeline through Afghanistan before the Russians. I don't think this makes sense simply because it seems that Russian and Iran were supposedly both at the meeting. Nevertheless there is a very interesting history to this story and it could be something worth thinking about. In any case, whatever the motivation, the US seems to have had some sort of talks with the taliban and made some sort of threat against them. Many of the discussions around this seem to place this as some sort of indirect cause to 9/11, i.e. bin Laden qua Afghanistan was simply trying to beat the US to the punch and hit us before we hit them. This also has little credibility as the operatives that were supposed to carry all of the 9/11 hijackings out most certainly had their orders and had already been in the process of trainign for the attacks well before July 2001.

A more interesting question--especially in regards to the Clarke allegations and the discussion of FBI/CIA activities around this time--is that W supposedly had the FBI call off some of their investigations around bin Laden in order to protect the family. I have little doubt that this is somewhat true--even if he did ask for the 8/6 pdb. After all, the family was allowed to fly out of the US when no other planes were in the air on 9/11. If he did anything of the sort, then it seems that no one is really talking about it (at least right now.) As this would seem to be the best time for evidence of this sort, even that line of inquiry seems a little off. Nevertheless, they provide some interesting leads. I think it would be very interesting to know what Tom Simons said in that July meeting and I think I will try to contact him (after the conference is over this week).