In a memorably
explosive 2006 interview with Chris Wallace, former President Bill Clinton went off on a
finger-wagging “tear,” as Wallace put it, when questioned about whether he had
done enough during his terms in office to get Osama bin Laden. “I got closer to
killing him than anybody has gotten since,” growled a furious Clinton. Now a
recently-released audiotape confirms that Clinton did indeed have at least one clear
opportunity to kill the world’s most wanted man in 1998 – and passed on it, allowing
bin Laden to live to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.
Last week Australian
Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the state of Victoria,
unveiled on Australia’s Sky News a never-before-released audio of Clinton speaking to a group of
businessmen in Melbourne on September 10, 2001, recorded a mere ten hours
before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. In that recording, made with
the former president’s knowledge according to Kroger, Clinton responded thusly in
response to a question about international terrorism:
And 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. 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.
Questioned by Fox News about the Clinton recording, Michael Scheuer, chief of the
bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999, replied that Clinton was a “disgrace” and
a “monumental liar” for claiming that he didn’t kill bin Laden because of the
collateral damage. He asserted that only Taliban and bin Laden and his
crew would’ve died if Clinton had given the go-ahead for a missile strike on
the region in December of 1998. But Clinton didn’t act, said Scheuer,
because he’s a “coward morally” and because he’s “more concerned, like Obama,
with what the world thinks about him.”
In the 2006 Wallace interview,
Clinton referenced a wildly controversial ABC miniseries called The Path to 9/11*, which had aired a
mere two weeks earlier and which Clinton angrily called part of a right-wing
“disinformation” campaign against him. That docudrama, based in part on The 9/11 Commission Report, dramatized
the historical thread connecting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the Clinton era, the failure
to connect the dots under Bush, and the attacks of that September morning in
2001.
Prior to its
premiere, a false accusation of “conservative bias” on the part of the
filmmakers quickly spun into leftist hysteria that the $30+ million miniseries was a “well-honed
propaganda operation” on the
part of a stealth cabal of conservatives. Clinton and his supporters,
fearing the miniseries would tarnish his political legacy,
claimed it was full of lies and pulled out all the stops to suppress it,
including threats by the Senate Democratic leadership, led by Harry Reid, to
pull ABC’s license if the miniseries aired. With a few very minor edits, the
miniseries squeaked by and went on to high ratings; but it has not aired since
and ABC-Disney refuses to release a DVD [check out John Ziegler’s riveting
documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 for the whole outrageous story].
The miniseries featured
one particular scene vetted, as every scene was, by a battery of ABC lawyers, in
which a CIA team and its Afghan allies have bin Laden in its sights, call the
White House for approval to make the hit, and are denied the green light. Clinton
and his people attacked this scene as an outrageous fabrication.
But in May 2012, CBS’
60 Minutes broadcast a startling segment
featuring former CIA officer Hank Crumpton, Deputy Director of the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center, who discussed with interviewer Lara Logan his participation
in operations to capture and/or kill bin Laden well before 9/11. Crumpton complained
about “the lack of response on the
part of the administration” and described one incident in which his team
sighted bin Laden. It sounds very similar to the dramatized scene from Path to 9/11:
Crumpton: Our human sources took us to a village uh, far, not far from
Kandahar –
Logan: And what did you see there?
Crumpton: We saw a security detail, a convoy, and we saw bin Laden exit
the vehicle.
Logan: Clearly.
Crumpton: Clearly. And we had – the optics were spot on, beaming back to
us, CIA headquarters. We immediately alerted the White House, and the Clinton administration’s
response was, “Well, it will take several hours for the TLAMs, the cruise
missiles launched from submarines, to reach that objective. So you need to tell
us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now.” The frustration was
enormous.
Logan: So at that moment you wanted to kill him.
Crumpton: Yes.
Logan: But you couldn’t get permission.
Crumpton: Correct.
Logan then narrates
that Crumpton “couldn’t get permission to do anything, including allowing the CIA’s Afghan agents on the ground to
attack bin Laden’s compound.”
Now the Clinton
admission serves as further vindication for the Path to 9/11’s veracity; in fact, Scheuer also stated, as he has on
numerous previous occasions, that the Clinton administration passed on as many
as ten opportunities to nail bin
Laden.
Imagine how
different the world would be if President Clinton had pulled the trigger on bin
Laden in 1998. There would have been no 9/11, says Michael Scheuer, and
probably no Iraq war. “I worked hard to try to kill him,” Clinton insisted in
the Wallace interview. “I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We
contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody
has gotten since.” But when he could have, he didn’t. Even if it truly was out
of concern for Kandahari civilians, this question posed rhetorically by Scheuer
cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who was he elected to protect, Kandaharis or
Americans?”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/5/14)
