Bill Clinton says he authorized the CIA to try to take out Osama bin Laden before the September 11, 2001 attacks, but the agency killed the plan at the last minute, worried a failed operation could kill innocent civilians. The former president said he did not second-guess that call, even though he believed the plan might have succeeded and considered bin Laden the United States' biggest threat at the time.
According to the New York Post, Clinton said he wanted bin Laden captured alive while prioritizing stopping him altogether, and that the CIA simply did not want to risk killing many innocent civilians in the process. Clinton has described bin Laden as having substantial financial resources and operational capacity, and said the al-Qaeda leader had been planning an attack on U.S. soil for a long time.
A Consistent Account Over Two Decades
Clinton's explanation lines up with what he said publicly the day before the 9/11 attacks. On September 10, 2001, during a recorded business talk in Melbourne, Australia, Clinton stated he could have killed bin Laden in 1998 but decided against a missile strike on Kandahar because it would have killed 300 innocent women and children, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the audio recording was made public in 2014. The timeline shows Clinton's account of civilian-casualty concerns has remained steady for more than two decades.
That same month in 1998, Clinton had already ordered direct military action against bin Laden's network. Following the August 7, 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton launched Operation Infinite Reach on August 20, 1998, sending Tomahawk cruise missiles at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, per the U.S. Department of State. The strikes did not injure bin Laden.
Internal Tension Behind the Scenes
While Clinton has attributed the aborted strike to CIA caution over collateral damage, internal agency memos from 1998 and 1999, declassified in 2012, tell a more fraught story. Those documents, written by field agent Gary Schoen and bin Laden station chief Michael Scheuer, reveal that field agents and intelligence officers reported three separate opportunities to target bin Laden in Kandahar within a 36-hour window, but senior Washington officials balked over concerns that shrapnel could hit a nearby mosque or kill civilians, as reported by USA Today. The records show operational agents on the ground grew frustrated when leadership in Washington balked at striking.
The official 9/11 Commission Report situated these episodes within a broader assessment of the era, identifying nine key policy junctures during the Clinton presidency where a different decision might have led to bin Laden's death or capture, according to the 9/11 Commission Report. Executive Director Philip Zelikow noted that observers disagree on whether Clinton made the correct calls at each juncture, with choices shaped by varying intelligence assessments and concerns over collateral damage.
Newly Declassified Warnings Add Fresh Context
Clinton's comments arrive just after CIA Director John Ratcliffe declassified 71 President's Daily Brief reports given to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush between February 1998 and September 2001, the largest single release of CIA analysis tied to 9/11 in agency history, per the agency's own account. Among those documents was a September 10, 1998 brief titled Bin Laden's Location and Intentions, which explicitly warned that an al-Qaeda-linked group may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a U.S. city and identified Washington, D.C., as a prime target, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
A separate December 4, 1998 brief titled Bin Laden Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks alerted Clinton's White House that al-Qaeda was preparing aircraft hijackings inside the United States, noting that a hijacker cell had already executed a trial run at a New York airport, according to TRT World. That memo stated the hijackings were intended to leverage the release of imprisoned terrorists.
Where Clinton Was When the Towers Fell
Clinton said he was watching television in Australia when the September 11 attacks unfolded, and that he knew bin Laden was behind them the moment he saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers. His wife, Hillary Clinton, was in Washington that day, while the couple's daughter was in Lower Manhattan and among thousands of people told to walk north to safety. Bill and Hillary Clinton could not reach their daughter during the attacks, he said.
Clinton said he ruled out Iran as a suspect that day, reasoning the country would not carry out such an attack because the United States could destroy it immediately, and identified Iran and bin Laden as the only adversaries with the capacity to have done it. Bin Laden was hiding in a cave in Afghanistan at the time, and was ultimately killed in a targeted secret raid led by U.S. Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during Barack Obama's presidency.
Clinton's Warning for Today
Clinton joined former presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden at the National September 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2026, to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks, according to the Associated Press, which noted the ceremony maintained its longstanding rule against political speeches. Clinton said the United States is much better prepared for an attack of that scale now than it was in 2001, but stressed the country needs ongoing national-security planning and must continue gathering intelligence about the threat.
He said New York City could still face another terrorist attack and that the nation needs to stay on guard. Clinton added that the country may find unity by making major positive things happen and preventing major negative things from occurring. The 9/11 Commission Report estimated that al-Qaeda spent between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and execute the attacks, which killed 2,977 people in New York, Arlington, and Shanksville.
