Washington ? Both the Bush and Clinton administrations missed diplomatic and military opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before Sept. 11, 2001, according to reports Tuesday by a federally appointed commission investigating the attacks.

Bin Laden remained so elusive that two planned strikes were called off in 1998 and 1999, when he was reportedly in Afghanistan, because intelligence was deemed imprecise.

Efforts to capture bin Laden through diplomatic channels were stymied by political considerations and internal disputes that took years to resolve.

And both administrations deemed large-scale military action against Afghanistan, whose Taliban leadership harbored bin Laden, infeasible because they believed they lacked domestic and international support for such an operation.

Two preliminary reports of the bipartisan commission released Tuesday contain no smoking gun and avoid direct criticism. They seem unlikely to inflict direct political damage on President Bush, who has been criticized this week by his former counterterrorism coordinator for alleged indifference to terrorism. A final report is due July 26.

But the reports suggest some less-than-urgent responses to the threat of terrorism, particularly after al-Qaida attacked the United States by bombing two of its African embassies in August, 1998.

The report noted that the Clinton administration official responsible for the military’s counterterrorism policy left his job when Bush took office and was not replaced until after 9-11.

And although Bush’s Defense Department wanted new, “more muscular,” options for dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaida, a directive ordering the development of new military plans was not prepared until Sept. 4, 2001.

Accusations countered

Top Bush administration officials defended their actions and said a more aggressive response would not have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Even if bin Laden had been captured or killed in the weeks before 9-11, no one I know believes it would have prevented 9-11,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said, noting that the attackers were in the United States months in advance.

“Regrettably, 9-11 would likely still have happened,” Rumsfeld added. “And ironically, much of the world in all likelihood would have blamed September 11th on the U.S. as an al-Qaida retaliation for the U.S. provocation of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testifies before the federal panel in Washington, D.C., reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks. President Bush and former President Clinton took heavy blame during Tuesday's talks.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell responded implicitly to the recent charges by Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator, that Bush was slow to deal seriously with terrorism.

Powell read from a letter Bush wrote four weeks after taking office to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf urging him to influence the Taliban government in neighboring Afghanistan to close terrorist camps.

“At no time,” Powell added, “were we presented with a vetted, viable operational proposal which would have killed Osama bin Laden.”

As for the Clinton administration, the report suggests several instances of weak diplomatic efforts with Pakistan.

A 1999 State Department strategy that offered “carrots and sticks” to get Pakistan’s cooperation against al-Qaida was “watered down to the point that nothing was then done with it.”

The Clinton administration was torn between wanting to get rid of the Taliban by diplomatic means or by supporting enemy fighters. “The debate continued inconclusively throughout the last year-and-a-half of the Clinton administration,” the report states.

Sept. 10 plan

The debate continued when Bush took office and lasted until Sept. 10, when top national-security officials agreed on a three-pronged approach that started with diplomatic efforts to get the Taliban to expel bin Laden and, if diplomacy failed, relied on an overthrow of the Taliban.

The time frame for implementing the strategy was three years.

A report detailing the inability of the U.S. military to attack al-Qaida before Sept. 11 points to three purported spottings of bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998 and 1999. But strikes were not ordered in any instance because top military and intelligence officials were concerned about collateral damage and that they would miss bin Laden, who might have moved from the location where intelligence had placed him.

Madeleine Albright, secretary of State under Clinton, said the inability to pinpoint bin Laden “was maddening” — like an arcade game that players cannot win.

The report on military options states that officials from both administrations “flatly said that neither Congress nor the American public would have supported large-scale military operations in Afghanistan before the shock of 9-11 — despite repeated attacks and plots.”

That conclusion drew criticism from Nebraska’s Bob Kerrey, a Democrat on the commission and president of the New School University in Manhattan.

“History is replete of examples where political leaders made a decision in spite of public opinion being on the other side, and saying, I’ve got to persuade the people because I see it as being an urgent necessity,” Kerrey told Powell.

Powell replied, “I don’t think that in the case of al-Qaida and Afghanistan during this period it rose to that level of urgent necessity.”