by Frank Holmes, reporter

The worst terrorist attack on American soil and the longest war in U.S. history could have been avoided, but former President Bill Clinton passed on multiple chances to kill Osama bin Laden, a new documentary reveals.

Radical Islamic terrorists killed almost 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, when they hijacked three planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

In retaliation, President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror and sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan, which has resulted in the death of 2,219 American soldiers and is still raging 18 years later with no end in sight.

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But Bill Clinton could have stopped it all—and he didn’t just pass, he also threatened to send anyone who killed bin Laden to prison.

Under an order signed by Clinton, any service member who killed Osama bin Laden would be “risking jail,” says Bob Grenier, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan at the time, in the new Showtime documentary The Longest War.

In a typical Clinton word salad, the president’s order said the military could take “lethal activity” against bin Laden—but banned them from trying to kill him.

Instead, officers say Clinton ordered them to try to capture Osama bin Laden alive, which cut the likelihood of stopping 9/11 in half.

“We were being asked to remove this threat to the United States essentially with one hand tied behind our backs,” Grenier says.

Osama bin Laden already had blood on his hands. In 1992, he tried to bomb a hotel in Yemen to kill U.S. citizens.

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Al Qaeda was tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a 1995 attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia.

Intelligence agents sounded alarm bells about the terrorist network long before August 1998, when Al-Qaida bombed two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and killed 224 Americans.

Then in October 2000, Al-Qaida terrorists bombed the U.S.S. Cole in a harbor in Yemen, killing 17 members of the U.S. Navy.

All this happened before 9/11, but President Clinton blocked agents’ serious efforts to kill the man behind it all.

At the height of his impeachment controversy, Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that had nothing to do with bin Laden. And he signed off on an attack that missed bin Laden by hours.

But the 9/11 Commission report said that Bill Clinton had at least nine chances to kill Osama bin Laden during this time—way before 9/11—and he shot down everyone that got to his desk.

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Clinton even bragged the day before 9/11 that he could have killed the terrorist mastermind but refused.

“I could have killed him,” he told a group of Australians, in a speech on September 10, 2001, which was hidden until 2014. “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.”

But agents told Clinton about at least three other times he could have killed bin Laden without taking out a village—and Clinton backed out of those, too.

Once, agents had a crystal-clear video of the 6’5” terrorist at his hideout in Tarnak Farms, but the Clinton administration said it wasn’t ready to act.

“You need to tell us where bin Laden will be five or six hours from now,” officials replied.

The agents couldn’t believe their ears.

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The Longest War uncovers a tenth time Clinton could have killed bin Laden before 9/11 when agents wanted to plant explosives on a route they knew he’d be taking.

But Clinton gave contradictory orders that meant anyone who tried to kill bin Laden would face court-martial.

“Policy decisions were made that seem unfathomable today,” Grenier says in the documentary, “like a Justice Department ruling that it would be illegal for the United States to intentionally kill bin Laden, which left CIA officers in the field feeling frustrated and angry.”

Counterterrorist agents felt like “they were unable to prevent a train crash happening in slow motion right before their eyes.”

“The irony is that many of these same mid-level officers were later blamed for not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 attacks, when in fact the blame rests with the senior decision-makers who ignored direct warnings for far too long,” Grenier says.

In fact, Osama bin Laden came closer to killing Bill Clinton than Clinton ever came to killing bin Laden.

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The Secret Service stopped Clinton from driving over a bridge that Al Qaeda had rigged with explosives in Manila in 1996.

Even after the attempted assassination, Bill Clinton refused to see Osama bin Laden as a danger.

“The threat was real,” says Marty Martin, a counterterrorism agent at the CIA during the Clinton era.

“If President Clinton had taken action and killed Osama bin Laden, there wouldn’t have been a 9/11, and if there wouldn’t have been a 9/11 there wouldn’t have been an Afghanistan, and if there wouldn’t have been an Afghanistan there wouldn’t have been an Iraq. What would the world be like?”

We’ll never know, thanks to Bill Clinton.

Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”