--- title: Bill Clinton on bin Laden | TIME description: Clinton responds to a question from the audience about pursuing bin Laden during his presidency and the 9/11 commission (5:11) canonical: https://time.com/video/ixPImwAK/ og:title: Bill Clinton on bin Laden og:description: Clinton responds to a question from the audience about pursuing bin Laden during his presidency and the 9/11 commission (5:11) og:url: https://time.com/video/ixPImwAK/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ixPImwAK/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Bill Clinton on bin Laden twitter:description: Clinton responds to a question from the audience about pursuing bin Laden during his presidency and the 9/11 commission (5:11) twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ixPImwAK/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Bill Clinton on bin Laden > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Bill Clinton on bin Laden [Watch (HLS stream): Bill Clinton on bin Laden](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ixPImwAK.m3u8) (5:11)  _Published 2007-07-12. Clinton responds to a question from the audience about pursuing bin Laden during his presidency and the 9/11 commission (5:11)_ --- Jul 25, 2023 4:25 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Bill Clinton Said He Had Chance To Kill Osama Bin Laden](/video/pyDeaOxN/) ### Bill Clinton Said He Had Chance To Kill Osama Bin Laden [After bin Laden: Where Do We Go From Here?](/video/BQ5wXXsc/) ### After bin Laden: Where Do We Go From Here? [After bin Laden: Where Do We Go From Here?](/video/GyIYvBxI/) ### After bin Laden: Where Do We Go From Here? --- ## Transcript >> Mr. President, Elizabeth Drew, the Republicans obviously is a talking point up, obviously also to shift to blame, say that your administration failed to get Bin Laden. The 9 / 11 commission was somewhat critical. I know you did some bombing. What do you say about why anticipating, knowing that he was the problem, the African embassies were blown up. Why did you-- your administration not give him and that movement more priority? >> Well Elizabeth congratulations on speaking for the Republican National Committee. I mean, look, let's just go through the facts here, not the myth. The 9 / 11 commission did their best to be undone and evenhanded because they had a Republican congress and Republican White House and they wanted their recommendations accepted. When Rudy Giuliani said I didn't do enough in 1993, Bob Terry wrote, who was on that commission, wrote a letter tearing him up. You know, that's their first thing is, well Al Qaeda was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing. Nobody on earth knew that. Nobody on earth thought Al Qaeda was any-- was involved in any way in direct terrorist operations. We got every single person that was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing including an extradition from Pakistan and put them all in prison. We prevented an enormous number of attacks. The Republicans, let me remind you, when I tried to get Osama Bin Laden based on good intelligence, they accused me of wag the dog and they made fun of me and they said we shouldn't be doing anything about this, and one of the reasons I thought President Bush was disturbed is a lot of his NeoCon advisers said that we were crazy when we told them in the transition that the biggest problem was Bin Laden. They said any fool knew that Saddam Hussein was a bigger threat to our security than Osama Bin Laden. This was after the USS Cole, and that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. So the same people who are criticizing me now criticized me then because I was obsessed with Bin Laden. We dealt with him four to five days a week, every week for the last four years I was president. I did not turn down one request for the use of force. We tried to mount of CIA operation to go in and take him out, they couldn't do it. We contracted with travels to try to take him out, they couldn't do it. I was willing to use whatever power I could. We didn't have until 9 / 11 any kind of basing rights remember, in Uzbekistan or any place else. The logistics of doing this were much different. I would've attacked him at the end of my presidency even though they would have accused me of trying to affect the outcome of the presidential election. But the CIA and the FBI have not jointly certified that he was responsible for the USS Cole bombing even though we all knew it. If I had been president in the spring of 2001, when they did confirm that, I would've given the Taliban an ultimatum to turn him over or going after them. But I wasn't there then. So, I don't think there's any question if you look at all the things we did on terror, did I fail to get it? Yes. Did I try? Yes. I don't think there's any question that we were far more obsessed with him and I don't mind using the word, than the Bush administration, their obsession with Saddam. You can draw your own conclusions about who should have done what, when. I don't think we should be in the business of blaming anybody for 9 / 11. If you wanna blame somebody, blame whoever didn't communicate the message when the two FBI agents called the FBI central headquarters and said, " Hey! There are two people out here flying these airplanes and they're not taking off for landing ." Should we try to find out what's going on in flight schools and close the doors of the pilots? That's the only one factual breakdown I can think of that almost 100 percent sure would have prevented 9 / 11. Even if we had killed Osama Bin Laden, those people were already in America and they were here when I was president. Do I feel badly about it? Yes. Do I know anything I could have done to stop it, I don't. And let me say when I testified for the 9 / 11 commission, I went through several mistakes I thought I made with them, and I do think there are things that I should have done that would have handled some of this better but being more concerned about Osama Bin Laden ain't one of them. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Bill Clinton on bin Laden","description":"Clinton responds to a question from the audience about pursuing bin Laden during his presidency and the 9/11 commission (5:11)","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ixPImwAK/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2007-07-12T17:19:04.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ixPImwAK.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/ixPImwAK/","duration":"PT5M11S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/ixPImwAK/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```