In mid-January 2002, “SIGINT [signals intelligence] reporting coming out of NSA [National Security Agency] revealed that a relatively small number of Taliban military commanders had returned to Afghanistan [from Pakistan] and were operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The intercepts showed that the Taliban had reestablished a crude but effective communications system using satellite telephones, which […]
Category: quotes
1/15/2002
“By January 2002, the Afghan war had cost just $3.8 billion–peanuts compared with the staggering sums to be spent later in Iraq.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, Page 97 […]
1/14/2002
On January 14, 2002, “a little-noticed article in The Washington Times reported that the Pentagon had launched its own secret effort to develop a case for attacking Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein as part of the war on terrorism. …Established under [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz by [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, […]
1/14/2002
President George W. Bush on continued questions on our reliance, as a nation, on foreign oil: “We are too reliant upon foreign sources of crude oil. We’ve got to do a better job of not only conserving energy, but it seems to make sense to me that when we’ve got energy on our own hemisphere, and […]
1/12/2002
“On January 12, 2002, [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf made an important televised speech to the nation in which he said that Pakistan would no longer tolerate organizations that practiced terrorism in the name of religion.” – Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 256 […]
1/11/2002
During a Pentagon Briefing on January 11, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist’s question about whether the ICRC and other non-governmental organizations would be given access to the detainees: “… They will be handled not as prisoners of wars, because they’re not, but as unlawful combatants. The — as I understand it, […]
1/11/2002
“Asked by reporters about the treatment [of prisoners captured in the war on terror], [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld suggested at a January 11 [2002] Pentagon news briefing that they would be ‘handled not as prisoners of war, because they’re not, but as unlawful combatants [who] do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.’ […]
1/11/2002
On January 11, 2002, Chief Legal Advisor to the Department of State William H. Taft IV “submitted the State Department’s response to [Office of Legal Counsel John] Yoo’s [January 9, 2002] memorandum [which denied Geneva Convention protections to al-Qaeda and the Taliban]. Taft described Yoo’s reasoning as ‘seriously flawed,’ ‘procedurally impossible,’ and ‘unsound.’ Taft pointed […]
1/11/2002
“Military officials said they had culled the most dangerous of the roughly 10,000 prisoners caught there [Afghanistan] and shipped them to Guantánamo Bay. ‘These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 to bring it down,’ Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as […]
1/11/2002
“As the first load of prisoners arrived at the new military prison camp at Guantánamo, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, he [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] declared them ‘unlawful combatants’ who ‘do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.’ In fact, the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protections to anyone taken prisoner in an international […]