Bill Clinton on Sept. 10, 2001: ‘I could have killed’ bin Laden [View all]

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Ten hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, Bill Clinton allegedly told a group of businessmen in Australia that he had a chance to kill Osama bin Laden, but passed because it would have meant killing hundreds of innocent civilians. That’s according to never-before-released audio of remarks made public by Australian media on Wednesday.

On September 10, 2001, Clinton was speaking to a group of about 30 businessmen in Melbourne, including Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the Australian state of Victoria. The event was recorded with the former president’s permission, according to Kroger, but the audio never released — until Wednesday night, when Kroger appeared on Sky News with host Paul Murray to unveil it. Kroger said he had forgotten about the recording until last week.

At the event in Melbourne, which took place not long after the end of Clinton’s term in office, the former president was asked about international terrorism.

“And I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden — he’s very smart guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once,” Clinton is heard saying. “I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

full: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/bill-clinton-sept-10-2001-i-could-have-gotten-bin-laden

Daily Beast on 7/18: Document Dump Shows Bill Clinton Was Skeptical About Osama bin Laden:

In a handwritten note to his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, prompted by a New York Times article on Osama Bin Laden, Clinton wrote “If this article is right, the CIA sure overstated its case to me —what are the facts?” The note appears to be prompted by an April, 1999 article in the New York Times by Tim Weiner with the headline “U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.” The piece suggested that Bin Laden’s influence and power had been overstated in the aftermath of Al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. The article was published nine months after the embassy bombings which were promptly followed by U.S. cruise missile strikes on sites linked with Bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan.