Bill Clinton Hours Before 9/11 Attacks: I Could Have Killed bin Laden

[HT: Truth Revolt]

Hours before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bill Clinton told a group of Australian business leaders that he could have killed Osama bin Laden, but chose not to because the risk of civilian casualties was too great.

Former Australia Liberal Party President Michael Kroger appeared on Sky News’ Paul Murray Live on Wednesday and released an audio recording of a speech former president Bill Clinton gave to a group of 30 Australian business leaders just ten hours before the planes flew into the World Trade Center.

“Bill Clinton was answering a question from a member of the audience about international terrorism and he made some extraordinary remarks, which have hitherto remained in my vault,” Kroger told Murray. “It was only when we talked about Clinton and bin Laden last week and many, many people contacted me and said they were quite interested to hear what they’d forgotten — that Clinton was in Australia the day before the planes hit the World Trade Center.”  Kroger said he then remembered the tape and the comments Clinton made about bin Laden just a few hours before the planes hit the World Trade Center.

“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 said to the business leaders on September 10, 2001. “I nearly got him. And I could have gotten, I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and killed 300 innocent women and children. And then I would have been no better than him.”

Clinton added, “And so I didn’t do it.”

Kroger said that in the days after the attack, those who had heard Clinton’s September 10th remarks were “saying, ‘My God! Did you hear what he said at the meeting? He could have killed bin Laden and he didn’t!'”

Kroger noted that thousands were killed in the attacks and “the world changed. The world changed. And we’ve never been the same since, whether it’s airport security, whether it’s planes not flying over countries that are at war … the world has never been the same since September 11, 2001 and there’s President Clinton admitting just a few hours before it happened that he could have taken out bin Laden but decided not to. So it was an extraordinary thing for the president to say.”

“Here was a moment in time when — terribly for the world —  this man, bin Laden, was allowed to continue with his terrorist activity as Clinton was made aware of where bin Laden was,” Kroger said.

Kroger also noted in the interview that the Rwandan genocide is another black mark against Clinton’s name. “He says in his diaries — in his autobiography — that he should have intervened in Rwanda and he didn’t and there was a massive slaughter that took place there and the Americans did nothing,” Kroger told Murray.