“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 […]
Category: quotes
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. […]
12/17/2001
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.” […]
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
“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 […]
12/15/2001
In 2005, head of German intelligence, August Hanning, said “his agency learned that Bin Laden had been able to elude capture at Tora Bora [Afghanistan, in December 2001] by paying ‘a lot of money’ to the very same militias of the Afghan warlords to whom the United States had delegated…the task of capturing him, and […]
12/15/2001
“In [December] 2001 he [Taliban commander Abdullah Mehsud] had been captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and was transferred to Guantánamo jail, where he played dumb and convinced his U.S. interrogators that he was a simpleton. Released in 2004, he rejoined the Taliban in North Waziristan [Pakistan].” [The 15th of the month used for date […]