Responding to criticism that he didn’t do enough to combat terror during his presidency, Bill Clinton spends much of the second half of his book detailing his efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and other terrorists around the globe.
In the days after 9/11, Clinton was widely criticized for allowing al Qaeda to grow into a worldwide destructive force during his eight years in office – a claim the former commander in chief vehemently denies in “My Life.”
“Since we had been going after his organization for several years, I had known for some time that he was a formidable adversary,” Clinton writes after mentioning dual car bombings of the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 257 people.
“After the African slaughter, I became intently focused on capturing or killing him and with destroying al Qaeda.”
And efforts to rid the world of bin Laden had started years before the embassy bombings, according to Clinton. Elsewhere in the book, Clinton focuses on the capture of terrorists set on inflicting harm on the United States.