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Bill Clinton On Sept. 10, 2001: ‘I Could Have Killed’ Osama Bin Laden

By Dustin Wicksell
Published on: 17:00 PST, Jul 31, 2014

The day before the September 11 attacks in 2001, former President Bill Clinton allegedly ruminated about passing on a chance to kill terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, due to the collateral damage the strike would have caused.

Clinton reportedly made the comments on September 10, 2001, just ten hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Center. On that day, Clinton gave a speech in front of about 30 businessmen in Melbourne, Australia. Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the Australian state of Victoria, was in attendance that evening, and claims he recorded the remarks with President Clinton’s permission, according to MSNBC.

Sky News host Paul Murray aired the audio of Clinton’s speech Wednesday night, according to The Huffington Post. When asked about the subject of international terrorism, Clinton reportedly turned to the subject of bin Laden:

“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. 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.”

As Politico points out, the 9/11 Commission Report found that the Clinton Administration chose not to strike out against bin Laden in the late 1990s due to concerns over civilian casualties. A planned missile strike in December 1998 was called off over fears of 200 to 300 collateral fatalities. Some lower level government officials believed the number of possible civilian deaths was exaggerated, and were reportedly angry when the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised President Clinton against striking at bin Laden.

During a 2006 interview with Fox News Sunday, Clinton defended himself against critics who accused his administration of not acting aggressively enough against bin Laden. “I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since,” Clinton said at the time. “And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops [in Afghanistan] trying to kill him.”

[Image via Politico]

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