Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday that he had authorized the CIA to pursue Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks but that an operation he believes could have succeeded was abandoned over concerns that innocent civilians could be killed if it failed.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
Former President Bill Clinton said Sunday that the CIA halted a pre-9/11 operation targeting Osama bin Laden after officials concluded that a failed attempt could cause substantial civilian casualties, a decision Clinton said he accepted at the time but now wishes had produced a different outcome.
“I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out,” Clinton said during a Sunday interview with John Catsimatidis on WABC’s “Cats Roundtable.”
Clinton said his preference was to capture the al-Qaida leader alive, but he viewed preventing bin Laden from carrying out further attacks as the greater priority.
“I was scared, and I was mad because we tried to get him before, and the CIA at the last minute killed the plan that I think might well have succeeded,” Clinton said.
According to Clinton, CIA officials ultimately concluded that the potential danger to civilians was too great if the operation went wrong.
“They were afraid that if they missed, they’d kill a lot of innocent civilians,” Clinton said. “They didn’t want to run the risk.”
The former president said he did not challenge the agency’s judgment at the time. Looking back more than two decades later, however, he said he regrets that the United States was unable to do more before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I wish we had done even more to get him,” Clinton said. “I always thought he was our biggest threat.”
Clinton’s comments add his personal account to a documented series of U.S. efforts during his presidency to capture or kill bin Laden as American officials became increasingly concerned about al-Qaida.
The 9/11 Commission later detailed several such attempts. One of the most developed proposals involved a 1998 CIA operation that would have relied on Afghan tribal fighters to seize bin Laden and transfer him for prosecution.
The plan envisioned tribal forces entering the Tarnak Farms compound near Kandahar, Afghanistan, capturing bin Laden and moving him to a location where he could be transferred out of the country.
By the spring of 1998, the proposal had been extensively developed, but CIA leadership and officials involved in the operation concluded that the likelihood of failure was too high and did not recommend moving forward.
The commission also found that Clinton administration officials maintained that the president wanted bin Laden stopped and that later presidential authorizations permitted operations in which bin Laden could be killed if capture proved impractical.
Clinton said Sunday that the significance of the threat became immediately apparent to him when the Sept. 11 attacks began unfolding.
He was in Australia watching television when hijacked airplanes struck the World Trade Center in New York.
“I was watching television in Australia when the second plane hit,” Clinton said. “I immediately said that bin Laden did this.”
The attacks also carried a personal dimension for Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was in Lower Manhattan that morning, and her parents initially could not reach her.
Nearly a decade later, U.S. forces located bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He was killed in May 2011 when U.S. Navy SEALs raided his compound during the Obama administration.
Clinton said the experience continues to shape his assessment of the terrorist threat to the United States, warning Sunday that another major attack against New York remains possible even though U.S. intelligence and security capabilities have improved substantially since the period before 9/11.
“I think we have to stay on guard about that,” Clinton said. “We have to make sure we’re getting all the intelligence we can on the issue.”
“You only have to miss once,” he added. “It’s just something that has to be a continuing part of our national security plan.”
His comments combine regret over the opportunities that failed to remove bin Laden before 9/11 with a broader warning about the continuing demands of counterterrorism. While Clinton said he did not second-guess the CIA’s decision when it was made, he now says he wishes the United States had found a way to do more against the man he already regarded as the country’s most significant terrorist threat.
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