Who believes that Did Osama Bin Laden try to kill Bill Clinton?”
As the 9/11 commission investigates what Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush might have done to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one piece of evidence the commission will examine is a videotape secretly recorded by a CIA plane high above Afghanistan. The tape shows a man believed to Osama bin Laden walking at a known al-Qaida camp. The question for the 9/11 commission: If the CIA was able to get that close to bin Laden before 9/11, why wasn’t he captured or killed? The videotape has remained secret until now. Over the next three nights, NBC News will present this incredible spy footage and reveal some of the difficult questions it has raised for the 9/11 commission.
According to a new book by a professor at Duquesne University Law School, Osama bin Laden tried to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a 1996 visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the Philippines. This is something of a scoop, for although Ramzi Yousef confessed to plotting the assassination of Clinton in the Philippines in 1994–a plot that he said he abandoned because of tight security–and although Khalid Sheik Muhammad included a plot to kill Clinton during the 1996 visit among his confessions, this is the first published account that makes it seem that Clinton had something of a narrow escape. The story appears in The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, by Ken Gormley, a thoroughly researched retelling of the investigations into Clinton’s finances and sexual habits that will be published in February. In the book, Gormley recounts a story told to him by Louis Merletti, the former director of the Secret Service. During the 1996 visit, Clinton was sched
