According to author Peter Lance: “The 9/11 Commission Report published in July [22] 2004 and later nominated for a National Book Award, concluded that the original World Trade Center bombing cell was made up of a ‘loosely based group of Sunni Islamists;’ further, that the 9/11 plot had originated not with [World Trade Center bomber] […]
Category: quotes
7/22/2004
The 9/11 Commission’s report on July 22, 2004, gave insights into assigning blame for 9/11: “The story of 9/11 is not a story of how a handful of government employees made mistakes; it is the story of how an entire government–across two administrations [Clinton and Bush] and many bureaucracies–failed to understand and adjust to the […]
7/22/2004
The 9/11 Commission report of July 22, 2004, said, regarding the potential to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001: “We identified ten ‘operational opportunities’ when we missed a chance to disrupt the 9/11 plot. Among those opportunities were: the failure to share information about the two hijackers [Nawaf al-] Hazmi and [Khalid al-] Midhar, […]
7/22/2004
In their July 22, 2004, report, the 9/11 Commission agreed upon four overarching failures regarding the prevention of 9/11: “A ‘failure of imagination’ characterized our inability, at all levels of government and society, to appreciate the magnitude of the threat from al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism. A ‘failure of capabilities’ was a failure that limited […]
7/22/2004
Lee Hamilton, Co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, said on July 22, 2004: ” ‘There is no silver bullet or decisive blow that can defeat Islamist terrorism.’ Instead, it would take every tool of counterterrorism that the government possessed.” These included the ability to “prevent terrorist sanctuaries; work with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; sustain a […]
7/22/2004
Regarding the 9/11 Commission’s final report on July 22, 2004, Commission co-chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton wrote: “We discovered real defects within the United States government. Our recommendations arose out of serious concern. We found national security institutions built to fight and win the cold war, yet poorly designed to combat the stateless and […]
7/22/2004
According to information in the 9/11 Commission’s final report, which was issued on July 22, 2004: “The commissioners went on to report that in spite of all the [terrorism] warnings to different parts of the [Bush] administration, the nation’s ‘domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction and did […]
7/20/2004
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “testified to the Sept. 11 panel [9/11 Commission] that she did not recall being briefed on the [15 page intelligence] report [written by the Clinton Administration] during the transition period to the Bush administration, and she said she did not read it until after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Vice […]
7/18/2004
According to a deposition on July 18, 2004, when Brigadier General Janis Karpinski mentioned that there were innocent people being held at a detention center in Iraq, “Maj. Gen. [Walter] Wojdakowski, the second most senior general in Iraq at the time [replied]: ‘I don’t care if we have 15,000 innocent civilians, we are winning the […]
7/15/2004
Former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis observed in the New York Review of Books article, ‘Making Torture Legal,’ on July 15, 2004: “The Bush legal team…spent an extraordinary amount of effort figuring out how to steer top administration officials around criminal conduct. Their ‘memos,’ Lewis wrote, ‘read like the advice of a mob lawyer […]