US Politics
Trump says he could have prevented 9/11 and wrote about it in his book
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President Donald Trump has claimed that he predicted the threat of 9/11 in his book, published in 2000, but that U.S. officials did not listen to him.
Trump made the outlandish statement during a gaggle Sunday on Air Force One alongside Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Senator Lindsey Graham after the South Carolina Republican said Democrats should be celebrating the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“To my Democratic friends, you should be celebrating this. When Bin Laden went down, I was the first to applaud President [Barack] Obama,” Graham told reporters.
Trump then seized on the opportunity to mention how he supposedly predicted the 2001 terrorist attacks a year earlier in his book, The America We Deserve.
“You know I wrote about Bin Laden one year before the attack on the World Trade Center, and I said, ‘You gotta go after Bin Laden.’ It was in my book, and, very few people want to say that, but it was in my book,” the president claimed.
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The president then insisted, without evidence, that the terrorist attacks could have been prevented had U.S. officials heeded his warning.
“You know, if they would’ve listened to me, they would’ve taken out Bin Laden. Then you wouldn’t have had the World Trade Center tragedy,” Trump said.
Trump has falsely claimed for years that he predicted the danger of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, despite fact checks of his 2000 book finding it contained no such warning.
Although Bin Laden appears by name in The America We Deserve, the mention is brief and is not accompanied by any sort of warning. The terrorist leader is named in a paragraph about various security threats facing the U.S.
“One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is public enemy number one, and US jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis,” the book states.
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In the book, Trump did predict a major terror attack would soon take place in the U.S., writing that this event would “make the [1993] bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers.”
While his prediction would end up being correct, he did not mention Bin Laden or al-Qaeda as potential perpetrators of such an attack.
Fears that Bin Laden was plotting an attack were public knowledge by 2000, and U.S. intelligence agencies had the al-Qaeda leader on their radar, despite Trump’s claims.
In December 1998, intelligence officials told then-President Bill Clinton that al-Qaeda was planning attacks in the US, including training personnel to hijack an aircraft. By 2000, Bin Laden was on the FBI’s “ten most wanted fugitives” and “most wanted terrorists” lists.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 attacks carried out by al-Qaeda in the U.S. A decade later, Bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy SEALS in Pakistan.
