Osama bin Laden nearly killed Clinton in 1996, book claims

[RamboLiberal]

Osama bin Laden attempted to assassinate President Bill Clinton during a summit in the Philippines in 1996, says a new book about the 42nd president's financial and sexual scandals.

Ken Gormley's The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, set to be published in February, recounts an incident during Clinton's visit to the Philippine capital, Manila, in 1996 for an APEC conference. According to blogger Jamie Malanowski at True/Slant, moments before the president's convoy was to start down a route that would take it over a bridge in downtown Manila, the Secret Service was warned that an attack might have been planned on the bridge.

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During the 1996 visit, Clinton was scheduled to visit a Filipino politician. The route he was to take required him to cross a bridge in downtown Manila. As the motorcade was about to depart, Merletti received “a crackly message in one earpiece” informing him that intelligence operatives had picked up a transmission that used the words ‘bridge’ and ‘wedding’ in the same sentence. Since ‘wedding’ was known to be a code word for assassination, Merletti ordered that the motorcade be re-routed. An intelligence team then discovered that a bomb had been planted under the bridge. No estimate is given in the passage for how soon the motorcade would have crossed the bridge, but the implication is that the bridge was not far away.

The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public. ... It remained top secret except to select members of the U.S. intelligence community. The American government’s subsequent investigation of this plot to kill Clinton, however, revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan -- a man named Osama bin Laden.

Malanowski notes that the New York Times reported at the time that security services found two bombs around Manila during the president's visit, and neither of those bombs appeared to be the one found under the bridge, suggesting that as many as three bombs may have been planted around the city.

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/osama-nearly-killed-clinton/

[Captain Hilts]

1. OBL doesn't care who is president. nt

[peacetalksforall]

2. Sorry to say that 9 years of Cheney, Rumsfeld, andBush makes it difficult to believe

anything, even if it is related to Clinton. I'll wait on this one.

Does Clinton mention it in his auto-biography?

[dflprincess]

3. If he did

it was probably because Bushco wanted it done.