Bill Clinton says CIA abandoned plan to take out Osama Bin Laden before 9/11 over ‘risk’ of killing ‘innocent civilians’

Speaking with WABC’s “Cats Roundtable” radio show with host John Catsimatidis, Clinton, who left office at the beginning of 2001, told the host, “I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out.” He said that the main priority was to stop Bin Laden, but that he told the agency it would be good to capture him alive.

“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,” he said. Clinton added, “But they were afraid that if they missed, they’d kill a lot of innocent civilians. They didn’t want to run the risk. I didn’t second-guess them, but I think, in the end, [Bin Laden] was determined to do what he did, and he had lots of money and lots of capacity.”

“I wish we had done even more to get him. I always thought he was our biggest threat … I wanted to get him, and I did what I could to do that,” he said, per the New York Post.

Clinton said that he knew that Bin Laden was behind the attacks as he saw the second plane hitting the Twin Towers. “At the time, I was in Australia. Hilary was in Washington. But our daughter was in Lower Manhattan, and we were worried to death about her. She was one of the thousands of people who were told to just walk north. We couldn’t get in touch with her.”

“I was watching television in Australia when the second plane hit. I immediately said that Bin Laden did this. They all looked at me and said, ‘How do you know this?’ I said, ‘Well, because the only adversaries we have with the capacity to do this are Iran and Bin Laden.”

“And the Iranians wouldn’t do it because we could wipe them off the face of the Earth immediately. And Bin Laden is holed up in a cave in Afghanistan. I just knew it had to be him. I also knew that he had been planning to do what he did to hit us for a long time.”

The Trump administration on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 declassified documents that showed both the Clinton and Bush administrations were aware of threats from Al-Qaeda to use American passenger planes to undertake a strike on the US.

A December 1998 CIA memorandum stated, "Reporting suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh 'Umar' Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gama'at al-Islamiyya (IG) saying that as of late October, the IG has completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of Bin Ladin but that the operation was on hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options—perhaps including an aircraft hijacking."

Nine hijackers across four planes carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks on US soil. Two planes struck the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan, one hit the Pentagon, and a fourth plane, which was believed to be heading for the White House or Capitol Building, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers, killing everyone on board. The 1998 memo stated that members of Bin Laden’s “network” had “received hijack training.”