Fact check: Trump falsely claims his 2000 book demanded the killing of Osama bin Laden

Source: CNN | October 27, 2019 | Daniel Dale

(CNN) – After announcing the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, President Donald Trump on Sunday took questions from journalists — and made a major false claim about his past statements on Osama bin Laden.

Trump claimed he had been prescient about the danger posed by bin Laden, having called for the death of the al Qaeda leader in a “very successful” book he published in the year before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Trump said that he knew the threat from bin Laden at a time when “nobody” had “ever heard of” bin Laden.

“About a year — you’ll have to check it, a year, year and a half before the World Trade Center came down, the book came out. I was talking about Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to kill him. You have to take him out.’ Nobody listened to me,” he said.

“Let’s put it this way: if they would have listened to me, a lot of things would have been different,” he said.

Trump said he still hears people marveling about his supposed declaration.

“To this day, I get people coming up to me,” he said. “They said, ‘You know what one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen about you is that you predicted that Osama bin Laden had to be killed before he knocked down the World Trade Center.’ It’s true. Now, most of the press doesn’t want to write that, but, you know — but it’s true. If you go back, look at my book.”

We went back and looked at his book. It’s not true.

Facts First: Trump’s January 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” mentioned bin Laden once, but it did not call for bin Laden to be killed or warn that he would perpetrate a major attack if he were not killed. In a separate section, the book said the US was in danger of a major terrorist attack that would make the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center look minor in comparison — but it did not predict that bin Laden or al Qaeda would be the perpetrator of this attack.

There is also no basis for Trump’s claim that bin Laden was unknown to everyone else at the time. Bin Laden was a well-known figure in 2000, though he had not achieved the prominence he would gain with the attacks of 2001; the FBI had added him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in 1999.

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