Featured Image Credit: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Topics: Donald Trump, Osama bin Laden, US News
Jess Battison
Topics: Donald Trump, Osama bin Laden, US News
Donald Trump has bragged that he ‘warned’ of Osama bin Laden a year before 9/11 happened.
The US president has repeated his bizarre claim that he could have prevented the devastating terrorist attacks if he had been listened to at the time.
He decided to express this belief while giving a speech to hundreds of Navy personnel at the Navy 250 Celebration yesterday (5 October) at Naval Station Norfolk.
Wearing a red ‘USA’ hat and a red tie, Trump’s speech seemed to turn into a bit of a rally as he made promises to service members.
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And as well as revealing the date for a UFC event at the White House, he used this speaking opportunity to rant about his old 'warnings' over the founder of al-Qaeda.
“Please remember I wrote about Osama Bin Laden exactly one year ago, one year before he blew up the World Trade Centre, and I said, ‘you gotta watch Osama bin Laden!’” Trump said.
“And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true. But I said one year before to Pete Hegseth, I said one year before.”
Then seeming to forget some of the information about this claim, he continued: “I said one year before, in the book I wrote – whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you.
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“But I can tell you, there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden and I didn’t like it and ‘you gotta take care of him’.
“They didn’t do it, a year later he blew up the World Trade Centre.”
Trump said he’s got to ‘take a little credit’ as ‘no one else’ will give it to him, which is apparently an ‘old story’ for the president.
“If they don’t give you credit, just take it yourself,” he added.
Whatever Trump is trying to suggest, it doesn’t seem as though the 79-year-old predicted the 9/11 attacks.
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In early 2000 (at least 18 months before the terrorist strikes in New York), Trump wrote a book called The America We Deserve that briefly referenced bin Laden.
While not ‘exactly a year’ before, the book did identify bin Laden as a danger to national security in the US.
Saying the country was facing a ‘bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hotspots’, he mentioned bin Laden as he wrote: “One day we're told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. 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.”