DONALD TRUMP has sensationally claimed that Osama Bin Laden wasn't a "monster", two weeks before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The former president pointed to the fact that Bin Laden had only masterminded one terrorist attack, and claimed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - the leader of ISIS who died during a raid of his home by US troops in 2019 under Trump's watch - was a bigger threat to America.
"We took out the founder of ISIS, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, and then of course [Iranian military leader Qassem] Soleimani. Now just so you understand, Soleimani is bigger by many, many times than Osama bin Laden. The founder of ISIS is bigger by many, many times—al-Baghdadi—than Osama bin Laden," Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday.
"Osama bin Laden had one hit, and it was a bad one, in New York City, the World Trade Center. But these other two guys were monsters. They were monsters. And I kept saying for years, why aren’t they getting them?
"For years, I said it. I got them. The press doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it because they don’t want to talk about it."
Despite Trump's claim, Bin Laden has in fact been linked to a number of terror attacks, either by way of financing them or ordering them to be carried out, and many suspect that he's trying to play down the former al-Qaeda leader's importance because he was killed during an operation put together during the Barack Obama administration.
Nonetheless, his assertion is quite shocking.
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