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Just hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, former President Bill Clinton told a business audience in Australia he opted not to kill Osama bin Laden.
That revelation comes from an audio tape, long forgotten and just released for the first time by Australia's Sky News.
On the tape, Mr. Clinton is apparently responding to questions about terrorism from a business gathering in Melbourne, saying bin Laden is someone about whom he had given a lot of thought.
"I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden — he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once," Clinton says on tape.
"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 just didn't do it."
Mr. Clinton's remarks were made September 10, 2001, about ten hours before the attacks began, and recorded with his knowledge. It was only recently the former head of the Liberal Party in Australia's state of Victoria remembered Mr. Clinton had been in his country the day before the attack, and had been recorded.
Clinton was in office in 1998 when bin Laden directed attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Those attacks earned him a spot on the FBI's Most Wanted list.
It would take nearly ten years after those comments before bin Laden would be killed in May 2011, under orders from President Barack Obama after his location was discovered in Pakistan.
The 2001 attacks he directed resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania, when hijackers flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The third plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Becky Bruce is the executive producer of Utah's Morning News on KSL Newsradio.
