In a combative interview on “Fox News Sunday,” President Clinton defended his handling of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, saying he had tried to put Mr. bin Laden out of business and that he had been attacked for his efforts by the same people who criticize him now for failing to do enough.

“That’s the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now,” Mr. Clinton said in the interview broadcast yesterday. “They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.”

Mr. Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of orchestrating a “conservative hit job on me” and asked, “I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked, ‘Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole?’ I want to know how many people you asked, ‘Why did you fire Dick Clarke?'”

He was referring to the USS Cole, attacked by terrorists in Yemen in 2000, and former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke.

Mr. Wallace said yesterday that he was surprised by Mr. Clinton’s response to “a very non-confrontational question, ‘Did you do enough to connect the dots and go after Al Qaeda?'”

“I was stunned by this kind of conspiratorial view of all this,” Mr. Wallace said in a telephone interview. “All I did was ask him a question, and I think it was a legitimate news question. I was surprised that he would conjure up that this was a hit job.”

Mr. Clinton said he “worked hard” to try to kill Mr. bin Laden. “I authorized the findings of the CIA to kill him,” he said. “We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody’s gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.”

He told Mr. Wallace, “And you got that little smirk on your face, and you think you’re so clever, but I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried, and I failed to get bin Laden. I regret it, but I did try, and I did everything I thought I responsibly could.”

Mr. Clinton also criticized the ABC miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” which critics accused of distorting his record on fighting terrorism.

“ABC just had a right-wing conservative running their little ‘Pathway to 9/11,’ falsely claiming it was based on the 9/11 Commission Report with three things asserted against me directly contradictory to the 9/11 Commission Report,” he said.

The interview was taped Friday following Mr. Clinton’s three-day Global Initiative conference, and Mr. Clinton said Mr. Wallace was to have devoted half his questions to the conference.

Mr. Clinton told Mr. Wallace, “You set this meeting up because you’re going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because [Fox chief] Rupert Murdoch is supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about — you said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion-plus in three days from 215 different commitments, and you don’t care.”