Yes Clinton did say it and the 911 commission has a tape of him saying it. He later claimed he mispoke and they agreed to pretend to believe that.
BTW they had great evidence on OBL in the '90's. The problem was a lack of balls.
freerepublic.com
9/11 Report Concludes Clinton 'Misspoke' on Sudan Offer
NewsMax ^ | 7/22/04 | Carl Limbacher et al
Posted on 07/22/2004 11:55:03 AM PDT by pookie18
The 9/11 Commission has concluded that when ex-President Clinton gave a detailed account in 2002 of how he turned down an offer from Sudan to have Osama bin Laden arrested, he simply "misspoke."
"President Clinton, in a February 2002 speech to the Long Island Association, said that the United States did not accept a Sudanese offer and take Bin Ladin (sic) because there was no indictment," the Commission report says on page 480. Noting that the Commission had Clinton's speech on videotape, the report states: "But the President told us that he had 'misspoken' and was, wrongly, recounting a number of press stories he had read."
The report continues:
"After reviewing this matter in preparation for his Commission meeting, President Clinton told us that Sudan never offered to turn Bin Ladin over to the United States."
To corroborate Clinton's account, the Commission cited the testimony of discredited National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who is under criminal investigation for stealing 9/11-related national security secrets.
"Berger told us that he saw no chance that Sudan would have handed Bin Ladin over and also noted that in 1996, the U.S. government still did not know of any al Qaeda* attacks on U.S. citizens," the report says.
On page 109 of its report, the Commission states:
"Sudan’s minister of defense, Fatih Erwa, has claimed that Sudan offered to hand Bin Ladin over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so."
Contrary to the Commission's assertion, however, Clinton never mentioned the lack of an "indictment" as the reason he couldn't accept the bin Laden offer, explaining instead, "At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him."
In fact, prior to Sudan's attempts to hand the al Qaida mastermind over, reports appeared in USA Today and U.S. News & World Report detailing bin Laden-linked attacks that killed U.S. citizens in New York and Saudi Arabia.
A Commission spokesman told NewsMax last month that it has no plans to release its copy of Clinton's videotaped remarks.
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