“Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora [in Afghanistan in December 2001] was a touchy subject, a deflating counter to all the brave talk of ‘dead or alive’ that had launched the war on terror. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld’s solution was to cast doubt on the possibility that bin Laden had been there at all, […]
Category: quotes
4/17/2002
“Until April 2002, [President] Bush was firmly committed to ‘no nation building’ in Afghanistan. Then, on April 17 [2002], in a speech given at the Virginia Military Institute…Bush surprised everyone by calling for a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Afghanistan, referring to the plan the United States provided Europe after World War II. Bush promised to rebuild […]
4/16/2002
“On April 16, 2002, Walter Pincus in The Washington Post reported Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying about [weapons] inspectors [in Iraq] that ‘for the most part anything they found was a result of having been cued to something as a result of a defector giving them a heads-up.’ “ – Hans Blix, Disarming […]
4/15/2002
In a video released by Al Jazeera on April 15, 2002, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman “Al-Zawahiri claimed: ‘Those 19 hijackers who went out and worked and sacrificed their lives for God, God granted their conquest that we enjoy today. The great victory that was achieved was because of God’s help and not because of our […]
4/15/2002
From the Chilcot inquiry, the British public inquiry into their involvement in the war in Iraq: “Witnesses to the inquiry have indicated that [Prime Minister Tony] Blair made clear to [President] Bush from April 2002, nearly a year before the invasion, that he was committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein with or without UN security council […]
4/15/2002
“Mr. [Binyam] Mohamed, who was born in Ethiopia and moved to Britain as a teenager, was apprehended in Pakistan in April 2002 as he was trying to leave the country with a falsified British passport. He had been in Afghanistan and had undergone military training, which he said was to prepare him to fight in […]
4/15/2002
“A yearlong State Department study [the Future of Iraq Project] predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with [Bush] administration and Congressional officials. Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and […]
4/15/2002
Author James Bamford quoted conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor-at-large of The Washington Times: ” ‘When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 that war [with Iraq] was no longer a question of ‘if’ but ‘when,’ the casus belli had little to do with WMDs’, he said. ‘The Bush administration, they […]
4/15/2002
In April 2002, Deputy Director for CIA Operations Javes L. Pavitt said: ” ‘Against that degree of control, that kind of compartmentalization, that depth of discipline and fanaticism, I personally doubt…that anything short of one of the knowledgeable inner circle personnel or hijackers turning himself in to us would have given us sufficient foreknowledge to […]
4/15/2002
FBI Director “Robert Mueller, in a public speech in April 2002, recognized the intelligence shortcomings of the FBI and said steps were being taken to improve intelligence analysis. …’Our analysts do some great work, but we need more of them and we need to do more of the kind of strategic thinking that helps us […]