Eight months after he ordered the destruction of Osama bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons facility in the Sudan, President Bill Clinton doubted that the al-Qaeda leader posed a serious threat to the United States, judging from a hand-written note mad public Friday. The William J. Clinton Presidential Library released its latest trove of documents, including a hand-written note from the president to his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, on April 14, 1999. Clinton was reacting to a New York Times story the day before that questioned whether bin Laden was behind a pair of August 7, 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
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In a hand-written note to his national security adviser, Clinton questioned in 1999 whether bin Laden was behind terror attacks against the U.S.
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Sandy Berger, the adviser Clinton wrote to, told MailOnline exclusively that 'we were confident that it was al-Qaeda'
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A NY Times reporter had concluded it was hard to prove, so Clinton thought the CIA might have 'overstated its case' to him
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Plenty of evidence already existed, which the CIA presented him in 1998 after al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa
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Clinton himself ordered retaliation in Afghanistan and Sudan just weeks after those attacks – a move that some thought was inspired by the film 'Wag the Dog' about a war created to distract America from a sex scandal
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A best-selling author wrote that Sudan had offered to hand over bin Laden to the U.S. in 2006, but Susan Rice and others never closed the deal
Reactions online and in print to the publication of Clinton's 1999 note have generally been negative, focusing on @placeholder's indecisiveness in the face of a mortal enemy who would mastermind the deaths of thousands of Americans a few years later with the 9/11 attacks.