Taliban file update

The U.S. government pressed the Taliban to expel Usama bin Laden over 30 times between 1996, when the Taliban took Kabul, and the summer of 2001, but the talks were always fruitless and only three of the approaches took place in the first year of the Bush administration, according to a newly declassified State Department summary posted on the Web today. Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the previously SECRET NODIS document updates the Archive's Web posting of "The Taliban File," the seventh volume of the September 11th Sourcebook series. The report was recently declassified, along with five others, by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated October 13, 2001.