Madeliene Albright Bill Clinton 'Misstated' Bin Laden Offer

Newsmax
May. 03, 2006

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted Tuesday that Sudan never offered to round up Osama bin Laden and extradite him to the U.S. - saying President Clinton's claim to the contrary was "a misstatement."

Asked about Clinton's 2002 admission that six years earlier he had turned down Sudan's offer to extradite bin Laden because "he had commited no crime against America," Albright told Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes": "He was not [offered]. He was not."

"If you look at the people who were saying that, there were many people who were lobbying for Sudan," she claimed.

But in a Feb. 2002 speech to a New York business group, Mr. Clinton detailed the episode, explaining:

"We'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing 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."

Clinton recalled that he "pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

Asked why her old boss would make such a startling confession if it wasn't true, a flustered Albright told Sean Hannity: "Well, because there was movement. But believe me, if we had been offered Osama bin Laden then that offer would have been taken up."

The former top diplomat insisted that Clinton simply got it wrong, explaining: "What's been very hard is kind of a misstatement of a lot of facts on [the Sudanese offer]. Look - we worked very hard to try to deal with the terrorist issue. It was very different before 9/11."