They Didn't Want the Risk

 Bill Clinton is back on the record about the man who planned September 11. The New York Post has the interview from John Catsimatidis's WABC show, Cats Roundtable.

Source: Scouting America

Read it here: NY Post

Clinton says he signed the order. Capture would have been fine. Stopping Usama Bin Laden was the point.

“I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out.”

Then the plan died at the last minute. Not because the target was in doubt. Because the agency did not want the miss.

“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.”

“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.”

That last line is the one I keep. He wanted the man gone. He still thinks the raid might have worked. He did not override the people who pulled it.

He is not claiming he never tried. He is claiming he let the risk calculation stand. Twenty-five years later he still calls Bin Laden the biggest threat he saw, and he still wishes they had done more. Wishing is not the same as ordering them back in.

“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 also says he knew whose work it was when the second plane hit. He was in Australia. Hillary was in Washington. Chelsea was in Lower Manhattan, told to walk north with the rest of the crowd.

“I was watching television in Australia when the second plane hit. I immediately said that bin Laden did this.”

“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.”

Usama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in 2011. Clinton’s account of the earlier chance is not new in outline. What he is willing to say now is the reason the chance closed: civilian dead if the shot missed, and a president who did not second-guess the people who flinched.