Just 10 hours before the attacks of September 11, 2001, where nearly 3000 innocent people perished at the orders of Osama bin Laden, ex-President Bill Clinton was in Australia saying he had a chance to take the former al-Qaeda leader out — but passed. 
 
 At the time, bin Laden was lesser known to the general public but was on the FBI's Most Wanted list for his role in the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton was in Melbourne, speaking to a small group of business leaders on Sept. 10, 2001, and he was asked about terrorism. 
 
 "I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden — he’s a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once,” Clinton says in the recording. "I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I just didn't do it." 
 
 The recording was lost and forgotten about until last week, when Michael Kroger, the former head of the Liberal Party in the Australian state of Victoria, remembered he had the tape, and Sky News in Australia played it on Thursday. 
 
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 Bill Clinton on 9/10: "I could have killed [OBL]" but civillian deaths meant "I would have been no better than him." http://t.co/Nyo4xMCIuu — Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) July 31, 2014 
 
 — Hasani Gittens 

 Just hours before the 9/11 terror attacks, Bill Clinton told a group of Australian businessmen that he passed on a chance to kill Osama Bin Laden, according to a revelation by an Australian media outlet. 
 
 Only 10 hours before the first plane struck the World Trade Center, Clinton explained at a conference in Melbourne that when he was President, he let the chance to kill Bin Laden pass because the operation would have also killed hundreds of innocent civilians in Afghanistan,according to a Sky News Australia report. 
 
 The Clinton administration purportedly had several chances to take out Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but passed on them. Clinton has never before discussed his role in missing out on killing the terrorist leader so candidly. (AP) 
 
 “I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama Bin Laden — he’s a very smart guy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him — and I nearly got him once,” Clinton says on the recording of his speech. “I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him.” 
 
 “And so I didn’t do it,” the former commander-in-chief adds. 
 
 The Sept. 10, 2001, speech was recorded with Clinton’s permission but the audio was never released until one of the men in attendance unveiled it Wednesday night on the Australian television network. 
 
 A Clinton spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 
 
 It’s been reported that Clinton missed a potential opportunity to kill Bin Laden during his presidency. 
 
 The 9/11 Commission Report found that administration officials decided against a strike in Afghanistan in late 1998 that could have taken out the Al Qaeda leader in Kandahar, which is actually a city of more than 400,000. The U.S. had tried to wipe out Bin Laden in August 1998 with a missile strike that hit a terror camp in Afghanistan. 
 
 Bin Laden was killed in May 2011 during the Obama administration in a U.S. raid on his Pakistan hideout. 
 
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– On the day before the 9/11 attacks, Bill Clinton spoke openly about having passed up a chance to kill Osama bin Laden, according to a tape unearthed by Sky News Australia. "I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden—he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him—and I nearly got him once," Clinton says on the tape. "I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn't do it." When the recording was made, just 10 hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Clinton was speaking to a group of business leaders in Melbourne, NBC reports. The talk was reportedly recorded with Clinton's permission, and the tape surfaced this week after one of the business leaders at the lunch remembered he had it. The 9/11 Commission found that the Clinton administration decided against a strike in Kandahar in late 1998, reports the New York Daily News, which notes that Kandahar isn't a "little town" but a city of more than 400,000 people—and one that is now very familiar to US troops.