For the first time ever, ex-President Bill Clinton has admitted that he once publicly confessed to turning down an offer to have Osama bin Laden arrested before the 9/11 attacks. But in an interview broadcast Sunday, he now says that his confession was "not accurate."
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"What I said there was wrong, what I said was in error," Clinton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, after she asked specifically about a 2002 speech to a Long Island business group where he detailed a 1996 offer from Sudan for bin Laden’s extradition. The ex-president did not contest - as some of his defenders have - that his 2002 remarks sounded like a confession. "I’d said that we were told we couldn’t hold him, implying that we had a chance to get him," he told CNN. "But we didn’t. That’s not factually accurate," he insisted again. The speech was recorded by NewsMax.com, as well as the Long Island Association, which hosted the event. The LIA has declined to make their own recording public, though the group has supplied the 9/11 Commission with a videotape.
Just three months ago, when asked about print reports documenting his bin Laden confession, Clinton told the Commission: "That was a misquote." But that was before he learned that his remarks were on tape. When Amanpour asked him directly about the recording, Clinton said he had "reconstructed all the records, read all the documents" about the Sudanese controversey and had concluded his earlier recollection was wrong. "Here’s what is factually accurate," he told her. "In 1996 - and before then when we found out about bin Laden - we at first thought he was a financier of terrorism but not a ringleader . . . When he took up residence in Sudan, after having been ejected from Saudi Arabia, it is true that at some point during that period, there was some discussion in the Justice Department casting a doubt on how long we could hold him." |