On December 17, 2001, “The results of a CIA-administered polygraph determine that Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who claimed to have helped Saddam’s men secretly bury tons of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, was lying. Al-Haideri claimed the weapons were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, and stashed beneath the Saddam […]
Category: quotes
12/17/2001
“By December 17 [2001], the battle of Tora Bora [Afghanistan] was over. Dalton Fury [pseudonym], the Delta [Force] commander on the ground, estimated that at battle’s end there were some 220 dead militants and fifty-two captured fighters, who were mostly Arabs, with a dozen Afghans and a sprinkling of Chechens and Pakistanis. Around twenty of […]
12/17/2001
“On December 17, 2001, it is believed that bin Laden and his remaining lieutenants crossed the [Afghan] border [at Tora Bora] into the lawless tribal region of Pakistan.” – Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush, Page 73 […]
12/17/2001
Regarding former President Bill Clinton’s casual responses to terrorist attacks, his political advisor and pollster, Dick Morris, said in a National Review article on December 17, 2001: ” ‘He had almost an allergy to using people in uniform… he was terrified of incurring casualties; the lessons of Vietnam were ingrained far too deeply in him. […]
12/16/2001
” ‘We’ve destroyed al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and we have ended the role of Afghanistan as a haven for terrorist activity,’ Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on the NBC News program ‘Meet the Press‘ [on December 16, 2001].” – John Kifner and Eric Schmitt, “Al Qaeda Routed From Afghanistan, U.S. Officials Say,” The […]
12/16/2001
On December 16, 2001, “one week after [Vice President Dick] Cheney told [Meet the Press host Tim] Russert that the contact between [lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed] Atta and [senior Iraqi Intelligence Service official] Ahmad al Ani had been ‘pretty well confirmed,’ an unnamed intelligence official confirmed the report, telling the New York Times ‘there was […]
12/15/2001
In December 2001, “the American military learned that Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, a dense mountain range in southeastern Afghanistan. …Instead of sending thousands of American soldiers to go into the mountain range to capture or kill Bin Laden, [President] Bush did not send one single American soldier. He only dispatched forty American […]
12/15/2001
“Muhammad Musa, a laconic, massively built commander…led six hundred Afghan soldiers on the Tora Bora front lines [in Afghanistan in December 2001]. …Musa said he was not impressed by the American forces on the ground. ‘They were not involved in the fighting,’ he said. ‘There were six American soldiers with us, U.S. Special Forces. They […]
12/15/2001
“Lutfullah Mashal, a senior spokesperson for the Afghanistan Interior Ministry, confirmed in 2005…that Bin Laden had paid for his escape from Tora Bora into Pakistan [in December 2001]. …the recipients of the money…[were] Afghan commanders loyal to Maulvi Yunus Khalis. Khalis was a top mujahedin leader during the Afghan-Soviet War whose family compound Bin Laden, […]
12/15/2001
In the battle of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in mid-December 2001, “Some thirty U.S. SOF [Special Operations Forces] arrived three days after the battle started–and, in reality, was already lost–while B-52s carried out heavy bombing of the mountains. The main force of Arabs had escaped with the help of Afghan commanders who had been bribed. Between […]