Ex-president Bill Clinton insisted to "60 Minutes" on Sunday that there's no evidence he turned down an offer from Sudan to have Osama bin Laden arrested in 1996, even though he admitted two years ago that he had indeed spurned such an offer.
Asked about the accusation by 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey that he "let pass opportunities to arrest or kill the al Qaida leadership," Clinton told CBS's Dan Rather, "I don't believe that is true." Without any prompting from Rather, Clinton zeroed in on the Sudan episode specifically.
Swallowing with a determined nervousness before he began, the ex-president insisted:
"There was a story, which is factually inaccurate, that the Sudanese offered bin Laden to us. As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence of that."
In fact, the evidence of such an offer includes Clinton's own admission to a New York business group on Feb. 15, 2002.
"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan," Clinton told the Long Island Association. "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 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.
"So I 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."
Last Thursday, NewsMax.com offered "60 Minutes" its exclusive recording of Clinton's bin Laden admission.
After initially expressing interest in obtaining a videotape of the remarks - filmed by the Long Island Association but never before shown in public - a "60 Minutes" spokesman said producers thought there was little difference between what Clinton told Rather and his earlier comments.
"Clinton didn't say Sudan had offered to arrest bin Laden, did he?" the spokesman argued.
During Sunday night's broadcast, Mr. Rather made no mention that Clinton had earlier admitted to turning down the Sudanese offer.
In its June issue, Vanity Fair magazine called Clinton's failure to accept the Sudanese offer "the most devastating" charge against him, saying it was also "the hardest charge to dismiss" because of Newsmax.com's recording.
