Following the November 2001 investigation by the U.S. embassy in Niger into sales of uranium from Niger to Iraq, “State Department analysts…concluded that the Niger deal was a fraud. In December 2001, Greg Thielmann, director for strategic proliferation and military affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), reviewed Iraq’s WMD program […]
Category: quotes
12/15/2001
“In his memoir Jawbreaker, published in 2005, [top CIA Commander Gary] Berntsen, a Bush loyalist, tells of how his teams found bin Laden and his remaining entourage in the [Tora Bora] mountains of the Afghan-Pakistani border [in December 2001] and begged Centcom [Central Command] for eight hundred U.S. Army Rangers to ‘block a possible Al-Qaeda […]
12/15/2001
In late October 2001, “the Czech interior minister set off an international furor when he said that an Iraqi intelligence officer had met in Prague with Mohammed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the [9/11] attacks, just five months before the hijackings [April 2001]. …But by December [2001], Czech and American officials backed off, saying that […]
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 […]
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 […]
12/15/2001
An article in The New York Times on May 6, 2004, revealed a suspicious action taken by a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official. “Shortly after the [9/11] attacks, air traffic controllers who handled two of the hijacked flights recorded their experiences on tape. But the tape cassette was deliberately destroyed [sometime between December 2001 and […]