Vanity Fair Credits NewsMax for Clinton's bin Laden Woes

The June edition of Vanity Fair is hitting newsstands and it credits NewsMax.com for most of Clinton's post-9/11 woes.

While ex-President Clinton has managed to rise above most of the scandals that characterized his White House years, Vanity Fair magazine says that the episode that continues to damage his legacy most is a recording by NewsMax.com of Clinton's admission that he turned down a deal for Osama bin Laden's arrest in 1996.

"The hardest charge to dismiss is the most devastating," reports Vanity Fair in its June issue. "Five years before 9/11, it was said, Osama bin Laden had been presented to Bill Clinton on a silver platter, and he refused to take him."

Before NewsMax released its smoking-gun tape, Vanity Fair says, Clinton officials such as former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger denied up and down that Sudan had any intention of extraditing bin Laden.

Others, such as U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, however, claimed otherwise.

"Who was right hadn't been resolved when Clinton addressed a businessman's group on Long Island on February 15, 2002," the magazine said. "A tape recording obtained by the right wing Web site NewsMax.com captured Clinton saying the following:

"'Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again.

"'They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here, because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

"'So I pleaded with the Saudis to take take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato.'"

Though there was ample intelligence and evidence that bin Laden indeed had been behind attacks against Americans, contradicting Clinton's claim, Vanity Fair noted, "Although the [Clinton] admission passed without notice in most of the mainstream media, the damage was done.

"According to a January 2002 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who thought history would rate Clinton's presidency as 'poor' was more than half again what it had been the year before."

Two years later, the infamous tape continues to haunt the Democratic Party's most popular figure.

Vanity Fair notes that when Clinton was grilled about his bin Laden admission by the 9/11 Commission last month, he called it "a misquote," apparently hoping the commissioners didn't know it was on tape.

As NewsMax noted at the time, after 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey compared Clinton's testimony to his February 2002 remarks, he told a radio interviewer, "[This is] much different from what we heard."

Kudos to Vanity Fair for covering the bombshell the mainstream press has tried to bury for more than two years.

We think it's an important part of the historical backdrop to America's darkest day ever - and we trust Vanity Fair's readers will think so too.

Editor's note: