American Taliban member John Walker Lindh was “present during a prison uprising in Afghanistan [on November 25, 2001] by Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees that resulted in the death of Capt. Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann, although there is no evidence that Lindh was responsible for Spann’s death.” – Peter Margulies, Law’s Detour, Page 47 […]
Category: quotes
11/25/2001
“Once victory in Afghanistan was ensured, [President] Bush had privately instructed [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld in late November 2001 to dust off the military’s Iraq invasion plans, which had been on the shelf with minimal updates since the 1991 Gulf War. Rumsfeld had delegated the assignment to General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM [Central Command] […]
11/25/2001
“In November [25, 2001], CIA officers went to interrogate Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners detained at a primitive nineteenth-century Afghan fortress, Qala-i-Jangi. A riot ensued. Using weapons smuggled onto the complex, enemy fighters killed one of our officers, Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann, making him the first American combat death in the war.” – George W. Bush, […]
11/25/2001
American Taliban John Walker Lindh was captured, and subsequently nearly killed, by the Northern Alliance on November 25, 2001. “Lindh managed to survive…and eventually fell into the hands of the CIA and Special Forces, who proceeded to interrogate him. According to documents later unearthed by Richard Serrano of the Los Angeles Times, a Special Forces […]
11/25/2001
“After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations. …The killings occurred in late November 2001… Thousands of Taliban fighters […]
11/25/2001
“On November 25 [2001] the first U.S. Marines landed in Afghanistan, deployed from U.S. battleships off the coast of Pakistan. They established forward operating base Camp Rhino, sixty miles southwest of Kandahar, in order to trap fleeing Taliban.” – Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, “U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.’s Died,” Page 95 […]
11/25/2001
“In late November [2001], probably within days after bin Laden had arrived in the area, [CIA Field Commander Gary] Berntsen’s team tracked him to a mountainous area called Milawa, just below the peaks of Tora Bora [Afghanistan]. Berntsen’s men called in airstrikes–a barrage from B-52s, F-15s and plenty more–that lasted nearly 60 hours. ‘Our guys […]
11/25/2001
Bin Laden was tracked to the mountainous areas of Milawa and Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in late November 2001. After unsuccessful attacks on him, CIA Field Commander Gary “Berntsen, who was back in Kabul, summoned several members of his team to tell him what they would need to take down bin Laden now that they thought […]
11/25/2001
At a briefing in late November 2001, CIA Director George “Tenet laid out for Vice President [Dick] Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a stunning trove of new intelligence [on al Qaeda’s attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities]… Cheney, by [journalist Ron] Suskind’s account, had been grappling with how to think about ‘a low-probability, high-impact […]
11/24/2001
Then-CIA Director George Tenet wrote: “After the [Afghan] city of Konduz fell on November 24 [2001], Northern Alliance forces incarcerated many hundreds of prisoners in a nineteenth-century fortress called Qala-i-Jangi. …Many of the Taliban POWs were foreigners, including at least fifty Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and elsewhere. Also in the mix were Russians, […]