Trump just claimed he predicted 9/11 and told government to kill Bin Laden

Donald Trump delivered a long speech, followed by a question-and-answer session about a US-led raid that led to the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – where he spoke about predicting Osama Bin Laden’s attack in 9/11.

During the speech, in which he called terrorists “puppies,” praised Russia and ISIS using the internet “better than anyone in the world” except him, he went off on a tangent about warning people prior to 9/11 of the threat of Osama Bin Laden.

He said that before 9/11 he wrote a book in which he warned against Osama Bin Laden. “I didn’t get any credit. I never do,” he said.

I said you have to kill him, you have to take him out and nobody ever listened to me ... Let’s put it this way, if they had listened to me a lot of things would have been different.

Is it true?

As with all things Trump, the answer is a bit more complicated than yes or no.

Whilst it is true that he wrote a book about it, called The America We Deserve, which came out one and a half years before al-Qaida’s attack on 11 September 2001.

Here is what he wrote at the time:

One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is public enemy Number One, and U.S. jet fighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.

Trump’s book did not call for further US action against Bin Laden, and neither had he written of Bin Laden before anybody else knew of him, to kill him or “take him out,” nor did he “predict Osama Bin Laden.”

And finally, whilst Trump did predict that US was at risk of a terrorist attack much bigger than the 1993 World Trade Centre bon, he did not explicitly tie that to Al-Qaida, or as a further attack on the twin towers.

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