What Bill Clinton just told a New York radio audience about bin Laden is not true. I know, because I reported this out in detail for my 2003 book, "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11." On WABC, Clinton said: "I had authorized the CIA to try to take him out. But they were afraid that if they missed, they'd kill a lot of innocent civilians. They didn't want to run the risk. I didn't second-guess them..." That is not what happened at the moment his administration had its best shot. On May 18, 1996, bin Laden left Khartoum for Jalalabad aboard a chartered C-130, traveling with his wives, children, and roughly 150 of his top aides and lieutenants. The flight had to stop to refuel in Qatar. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center drew up an operations plan to interdict that plane in international airspace and force it down. It went to the White House and was presented to President Clinton. And he decided not to act — because he and most of his senior advisors already considered it a win just to have pushed bin Laden out of Sudan. Here is what a former CIA analyst assigned to the Counterterrorism Center told me on the record for the book: "We were just incensed after we learned there would be no action on our recommendation. We had clear and convincing proof of what bin Laden had done, and it would have been easy to bring him in." And here's the part Clinton doesn't mention on the radio: after 9/11, he told a dinner guest in New York that passing on bin Laden in 1996 was "probably the biggest mistake of my presidency." So the CIA didn't block a strike out of fear of civilian casualties. The decision not to act on a workable interdiction plan was made at the top of the administration. Rewriting that now doesn't change the record.