“…Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, alleged to be an al Qaeda leader, was captured in Afghanistan and transferred to the USS Bataan somewhere in the Indian Ocean in January 2002. The USS Bataan is one of as many as seventeen ships used by the United States as floating prisons, in which detainees were kept and interrogated under […]
Category: quotes
1/15/2002
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 […]
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
“In [Chief Legal Advisor to the Department of State William H.] Taft’s view, [Deputy Assistant Attorney General John] Yoo had completely misread international law [in his interpretations of how the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners of the war on terror]. ‘Both the most important factual assumptions on which your draft is based and its legal […]
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 […]