“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
“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 […]
4/15/2002
After seeing how CIA agents handled the interrogation of Al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubayda in April 2002, “The FBI agents, with their traditions of working within the U.S. criminal legal framework, were appalled. …reports of deliberate prisoner abuse reached the top rungs of the FBI, causing the Director, [Robert] Mueller, to bar the Bureau’s […]
4/15/2002
In April 2002, “CIA case officers stationed all over Europe were ordered to attend a special conference in Rome, during which officials from the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group casually told the assembled CIA officers that Iraq had been on the Bush agenda from the very beginning. ‘They said this was on Bush’s agenda when he […]
4/15/2002
“By the following April [2002], the ICC [International Criminal Court] had received more than the required sixty government ratifications [needed to go into effect], and the court was launched over U.S. objections. In response, the Bush administration restated its opposition to the treaty, adding that the treaty would not proceed to the Senate for ratification. […]