An audio tape of Bill Clinton released on Wednesday confirmed longstanding reports that he ‘could have killed’ Osama bin Laden but decided not to because he was concerned about civilian casualties in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The audio recording, made with Clinton’s permission by former president of Australia’s Liberal Party Michael Kroger and released to Sky News by Kroger, reveals Clinton telling the former Australian politician and more than two dozen Australian businessman about the missed opportunity during a visit to Australia several months after the end of his presidency.
The conversation eerily took place the day before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks masterminded by bin Laden.
‘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 can be heard saying in the recording.
Audio of a meeting between former President Bill Clinton and former Australian political leader Michael Kroger from Sept. 10, 2001, reveals that Clinton had the opportunity to kill Osama Bin Laden when he was president but didn’t
‘I nearly got him. And I could have gotten, 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,’ Clinton said. ‘And so I didn’t do it.’
Kandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban, and it became the physical home of bin Laden during Clinton’s second term as president. Bin Laden was believed to be living at a compound in Kandahar called Tarnak Farms at the time.
Clinton’s account of the abandoned bin Laden mission matches up with a 2004 NBC News report that showed the Clinton administration had eyes on bin Laden in the 2000 and in a 2005 book that claimed Clinton once has the chance to take out bin Laden but didn’t.
During the 9/11 investigation NBC obtained a secret, CIA video of Tarnak Farms taken by Predator drones in the fall of 2000. The images in the video are difficult to make out to the untrained eye, but an intelligence analyst for NBC said the video shows a man roughly the same height as bin Laden in white robes walking around the compound protected by guards.
The NBC report indicated that all intelligence suggested the man in the video was bin Laden and questioned why the government didn’t kill him at that time.
‘We were not prepared to take the military action necessary,’ retired Gen. Wayne Downing, who ran counter-terror efforts for the Bush administration, told NBC.
Osama bin Laden, was later killed in a Navy SEAL raid in 2011, but not before carrying out the deadly September, 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people
The same incident was the subject of Pulitzer Prize winning author Steve Coll’s 2005 book Ghost Wars and rehashed in journalist Jane Mayer’s New York Times bestselling book – The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals – four years after NBC’s report.
In The Dark Side, Mayer summarizes Coll’s reporting, explaining that through the use of Predator drones, bin Laden ‘could be watched as he walked through the primitive, undefended, mud-walled compound he and his terrorist associates and their families inhabited in the bleak, sage-brush-strewn plains outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
‘The video imagery was so exquisitely detailed, U.S. officials viewing the videotapes at the CIA and White House could make out a lone child’s swing hanging in the compound,’ she wrote. ‘The robed man seemed to present an irresistible target for missile attack. But the swing haunted Clinton.
‘The swing suggested innocent children lived there,’ she noted. ‘The United States, for all of its military prowess, was a hamstrung Gulliver in the face of Lilliputian terrorists willing to sacrifice innocent lives in a way no civilized nation could.’
Previous reporting on Clinton’s hesitancy to kill bin Laden also indicates that the former president was pressured by then-Attorney General Janet Reno not to use deadly force to capture terrorist targets.
The CIA had ‘no written word nor verbal order to conduct a lethal action’ mission against bin Laden before the September 11 terrorist attack, a Clinton administration official told The Washington Post in 2004. ‘The objective was to render this guy to law enforcement.’
A record of Bill Clinton’s paid speeches shows that Clinton was in fact in Australia on the day that Kroger, the Australian businessman who released the tape, says the audio of Clinton was recorded.
A comprehensive list of Clinton’s speeches published by the Washington Post shows that Clinton was paid $150,000 by J.T. Campbell & Co. Pty. Ltd. to give remarks on Sept. 10, 2001 in Melbourne, which confirms Kroger’s account.
During his interview with Sky News, Kroger said he kept the audio tape secret until now because he simply forgot about it.
It was not until last week, when Bill Clinton was back in Australia for the opening of Torrens University Australia in Adelaide, that Kroger said he remembered the conversation.
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