Secretary of State Colin “Powell said on December 17, 2001, that al-Qaeda had been destroyed in Afghanistan (wrongly, it turns out) and that the country was no longer a haven for terrorists, while [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld refused to back up this comment, insisting instead on further use of military force in that country.” […]
Category: quotes
12/17/2001
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 […]
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 […]
12/16/2001
” ‘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
“After a few weeks, in December 2001, they [David Wurmser and Mike Maloof of the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group] produced a fat set of PowerPoint slides, each crammed with information on financial, operational, ideological, or other connections among terrorist groups and their state and nonstate supporters. This information had been developed through a careful […]
12/15/2001
U.S. military Commander Dalton Fury (pseudonym) spoke about his pursuit of Osama bin Laden in December 2001 at Tora Bora, Afghanistan. “At one point, he said, his forces were closing in on Bin Laden’s men–but he decided to abort the mission because he did not have support from Afghan troops. And in another incident Delta […]
12/15/2001
The capture of potential 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani in December 2001 was “the immediate cause for ratcheting up the military’s [enhanced interrogation] techniques. …top Pentagon officials were increasingly desperate for actionable intelligence on pending Al Qaeda attacks. …U.S. officials believed the suspect was hiding more, and that tougher measures were called for to make him […]
12/15/2001
U.S. military Commander Dalton Fury (pseudonym) spoke about his pursuit of Osama bin Laden in December 2001 at Tora Bora, Afghanistan. “One night–alone without his Afghan allies–Fury said he was told Bin Laden was two kilometres away. Faced with overwhelming odds, he elected to stay away. But the decision always nagged him. He wrote in […]