Got to take a little credit: Trump on warning about Osama bin Laden a year before 9/11

President Donald Trump took credit for warning about Osama bin Laden a year before the al-Qaeda leader perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, as he lauded US Navy Seals for putting a "bullet in his head" and dumping his corpse into the "dark abyss".

"History will never forget that it was the SEALs who stormed the compound (of) Osama bin Laden and put a bullet in his head,” Trump said in a speech at Norfolk, Virginia, on Sunday during a special celebration to mark the US Navy's 250th birthday.

Trump went on to add that one year before al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre twin towers in September 2001, he had warned about bin Laden.

"Please remember I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year before he blew up the World Trade Centre. And I said, ‘You got to watch Osama bin Laden'. And the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true. But I said one year before...I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn't like it. And you got to take care of him. They didn't do it. A year later, he blew up the World Trade Centre," Trump said.

"So got to take a little credit, because nobody else is going to give it to me. You know the old story, they don't give you credit. Just take it yourself,” he said.

Trump said that it was the US Navy that "dumped" bin Laden's "wretched corpse off the decks” of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson "to sink into the dark abyss".

In May 2011, US Navy Seals carried out an operation that killed bin Laden, who was hiding in a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The raid was carried out after it was authorised by then-President Barack Obama.

Obama, in a special address from the East Room in the White House, had declared, “I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”

Trump, who has been critical of the US exit from Afghanistan under former President Joe Biden's leadership, also said that the US would have won the Afghanistan war easily.

"But we got politically correct. ‘Let's take it easy'. We're not politically correct anymore. Just so you understand, we win. Now we win. We don't want to be politically correct anymore," he said.