‘I Predicted Bin Laden’: Trump Claims 9/11 Could Have Been Prevented If US Had Listened to Him
Newsbreak - January 5, 2026 - CSPAN
By Willa Pope Robbins
President Donald Trump said that he predicted the threat of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, claiming on Sunday that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center could have been prevented if U.S. officials had listened to him.
Trump spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One, alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
During the gaggle, Graham encouraged Democrats to celebrate the military action that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, telling press that “when Bin Laden went down, I was the first to applaud President [Barack] Obama.”
Trump seized on the comment, mentioning his own alleged prediction of the 9/11 attacks.
“By the way, you know, you mentioned something that’s interesting. Lindsay mentioned bin Laden. Do you know I wrote about bin Laden one year before the attack in the World Trade Center and I said you got to go after bin Laden,” said Trump. “It was in my book, and very few people want to say that, but it was in my book.
The president then claimed that the horrors of September 11 could have been prevented if his warning was taken seriously.
“You know that I think you’ve actually talked about it,” he said to a reporter. “But if they would have listened to me, they would have taken out Bin Laden and you wouldn’t have had the World Trade Center tragedy.”
Trump has made this claim repeatedly in the past, including as recently as October. Repeated fact checks consistently report that his 2000 book contained no warning whatsoever about bin Laden.
The book’s single mention of bin Laden appears in a section criticizing US foreign policy:
"Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess – one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. 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. jetfighters 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."
According to CNN, “In a separate section, the book said the US was in danger of a major terrorist attack that would make the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center look minor in comparison – but it did not predict that bin Laden or al Qaeda would be the perpetrator of this attack.”
Design by Israeli ambassador’s son chosen for WTC memorial
By ISRAEL21c Staff
January 11, 2004, Updated September 13, 2012
The “Reflecting Absence” memorial, consisting of two reflecting pools and a large grove of trees, was chosen by a 13-member jury of artists, architects and civic and cultural leaders.A design submitted by Michael Arad, a 31-year-old Israeli architect, and San Francisco-based landscape designer Peter Walker, has been chosen for the World Trade Center memorial after an eight-month competition that drew more than 5,000 entries from around the world.
The “Reflecting Absence” memorial, consisting of two reflecting pools and a large grove of trees, was chosen by a 13-member jury of artists, architects and civic and cultural leaders.
A jubilant Arad, a 31-year-old Israeli native who has designed two police stations in his job at the New York City housing authority, said he was surrounded by well-wishers after learning his plan was chosen.
“I am very honored and overwhelmed by the news that the jury has selected my design. I hope that I will be able to honor the memory of all those who perished, and create a place where we may all grieve and find meaning,” said Arad, who is the son of outgoing Hebrew University vice president and former Israel ambassador to the US Moshe Arad .
“I will do my best to rise to the enormity of the task at hand. It is with great humility that I regard the challenges that lie ahead, and it is with great hope that I will find the strength and ability to meet them.”
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Upon being notified of the decision, Arad called his parents in Jerusalem to tell them the news.
“I’m very proud, happy, and emotionally moved,” Moshe Arad told The Jerusalem Post. “I hope that the significance of this will be appreciated by both Israelis and Americans.”
Arad has been living in the U.S. since finishing his military service in the Israeli Defense Force in 1991. He received a BA from Dartmouth College, and a MA from Georgia Tech’s College of Architecture.
He lives in the East Village in New York City with his wife, Melanie Arad Fitzpatrick, and his newborn son, Nathaniel. Before he took a leave of absence to care for his infant son, Arad was an assistant architect for the New York City Housing Authority. There, he had worked to craft designs for a community policing center in Brooklyn. Prior to joining the city in 2002, he worked as an architect for Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, a Manhattan architecture firm.
Arad, who also has lived in Mexico, received his master’s in architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 before he moved to New York City with his wife, Melanie Arad Fitzpatrick, an attorney with Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, the prestigious Manhattan law firm.
Walker, whose major projects include the redevelopment of the site of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, was added to the memorial project after Arad submitted his design.
The winning memorial was announced Tuesday by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.,
the agency overseeing the rebuilding of the site.
The reflecting pools will mark the “footprints” of the World Trade Center towers. The development group said a revised version of the memorial will be unveiled next week, with significant changes that add trees and greenery around the footprints and expose the slurry wall, the last surviving piece of the trade center.
The design previously had a vast open plaza marked by just a few trees, but will now include “teeming groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth,” said jury chairman Vartan Gregorian, of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
“The result is a memorial that expresses the incalculable loss of life and its regeneration,” Gregorian said.
The development agency also said it is flexible about the grouping of victims’ names at the memorial, a point bitterly fought by rescue workers who want separate recognition for their colleagues.
Dartmouth professor John Wilson, who taught Arad in an architectural design course, noted that Arad’s art “reflected work that was different from other Dartmouth students ? because of his background and exposure.”
“He’d had a broader experience than the other students and he was aware of international trends. He talked about the architecture he had been exposed to,” Wilson told New York Newsday. Wilson added that “Michael had been exposed to a situation in the Middle East where there were a lot of cultural and architectural influences.”
Arad graduated from Dartmouth in 1991, after interrupting his pursuit of an undergraduate degree in order to return to his native Israel to complete military service in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The memorial, considered the long shot of three finalists chosen by the jury in November, will remember all of the victims of the Sept. 11 attack, including those killed at the Pentagon, in Pennsylvania and aboard the hijacked airliners. It also will honor the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The memorial will be one of two focal points at the trade center site, along with the 1,776-foot glass skyscraper known as the Freedom Tower. Four other buildings are planned where the trade center once stood.
The two pools in the design would sit 30 feet below street level, connected by an underground passageway and a small alcove where visitors can light candles.
Another Israeli-American architect – Daniel Libeskind – was chosen last year to design the master plan for the 16-acre site. Regarding Arad’s design, Libeskind said,
“I think it’s an idea that is simple, that is bold, that clearly refers to the footprints of the building.
According to Arad’s proposal, the design “proposes a space that resonates with the feelings of loss and absence that were generated by the death and destruction at the World Trade Center. A pair of reflective pools marks the location of the towers’ footprints. The surface of these pools is broken by large voids. These voids can be
read as containers of loss, being close-by yet inaccessible.”
“The pools are submerged thirty feet below street level in the middle of a large open plaza. They too are large voids, open and visible reminders of the absence. The pools are fed by a constant stream of water, cascading down the walls which enclose them. Bordering each pool is a pair of sloped buildings. These buildings create a sense of enclosure, capturing the exposed outer corners of the memorial site and defining a path of circulation around each pool. They also guide visitors to the site into the memorial itself.”
What Peter Arnett asked Osama bin Laden
By Peter Bergen
CNN
Updated Dec 19, 2025
It was a bitterly cold night in March 1997 in a mud hut high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan and we were surrounded by well-armed al-Qaeda fighters.
Peter Arnett asked their leader a simple question: “What are your future plans?”
Osama bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing,”
It was bin Laden’s first TV interview, and he and his team had chosen Arnett and CNN to conduct it, an interview I produced.
In the following year, bin Laden made good on his chilling threat with al-Qaeda’s near-simultaneous attacks on two US embassies in Africa that killed more than 200 people. In 2000, his men bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. Then, of course, there were the 9/11 attacks which killed almost 3,000 people and resulted in a “Global War on Terror.”
I first got to know Arnett, who died on Wednesday, in 1993. He was then one of the world’s most famous people and certainly its most well-known foreign correspondent. It was only two years after the first Gulf War and Arnett’s brave decision to remain in Baghdad after other Western reporters left, while American bombs were raining down on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, transformed CNN’s standing among viewers around the world. And it turned Arnett into a global celebrity.
You often heard Arnett before you saw him coming; a stocky man with a booming New Zealand-accented voice that could cut through glass. And then you saw the man himself: Larger than life does not do him justice; Arnett was a newsman’s newsman, full of tales of derring-do in Vietnam and many other wars around the globe.
I was thirty when I first met Arnett and I’d never been to a war zone. And soon, we were flying into Afghanistan in the middle of the civil war there. Kabul, the capital, was in ruins resembling Dresden after World War II; various warlords were fighting block to block. Child soldiers were a common sight. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan prime minister, had the distinction of likely being the only prime minister in history to shell his own capital on a daily basis.
Arnett interviewed all the major players in the civil war for CNN including Hekmatyar, Hekmatyar’s main opponent Ahmad Shah Massoud — who would be assassinated by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11 — and Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani who was killed by the Taliban in 2011.
During the Afghan civil war, shells were dropping constantly on Kabul and various ethnic and sectarian militias were battling each other in continuous firefights, yet Arnett seemed completely content. He wanted to be where the action was and Afghanistan in 1993 had action aplenty.
One piece of advice Arnett gave me then has stayed with me: “Never do anything for fun in a war zone,” which struck me as wise counsel.
We were in Afghanistan because we were tracking the bombers of the World Trade Center in 1993, a group of men – some of whom had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s or had supported that effort – who had parked a van packed with explosives in the basement aiming to bring down the Twin Towers. They failed to do so but six people were killed.
In 1997, I spent weeks negotiating with a group of bin Laden associates living in London to try and secure an interview with the al-Qaeda leader. We believed that bin Laden might have had a role in the 1993 Trade Center bombing. (We didn’t know it then, but Ramzi Yousef who masterminded the 1993 bombing, was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operational commander of the 9/11 attacks.)
Other networks were also pursuing an interview, including the BBC, and CBS “60 Minutes”. I believe that Arnett’s reputation for fairness in covering the Gulf War was crucial in CNN securing the interview.
Back on the Afghan mountaintop, Arnett asked bin Laden why he was declaring a jihad, holy war, against the United States.
Bin Laden gave a long answer critiquing American support for Israel and US allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia.
This reply undercut President George W. Bush’s frequent later claims after 9/11 that the United States was attacked because of its “freedoms.”
In his CNN interview four years before 9/11, bin Laden said his rationale for jihad against the United States was American foreign policy in the Middle East.
It was a privilege to spend many weeks in Afghanistan with Arnett in 1993 and then again four year later producing the first TV interview with bin Laden.
Arnett was a man who fear seemed to have no hold over. And I’ve never done anything for fun in an active war zone since.
