“In the closing stages of the 2004 presidential campaign [September 30, 2004], President Bush claimed that ’75 percent of known al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice.’ Yet when reporters pressed the White House for documentation to support that number, they were stonewalled. Asked about this figure, senior terrorism analysts from the CIA, the FBI, and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center…all confess that they have no idea what the basis for the figure is. ‘It’s a White House number,’ says one analyst… The White House has never explained the figure beyond saying that it is based on the number of al Qaeda members in the top echelons of the organization on September 11.”
– Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack, Pages 24-25