11/13/2001

Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote: “On the evening of November 13, 2001, I learned that the President [Bush] had signed a military order earlier that day that I had not even been given. The order directed the Defense Department to establish military commissions to try detainees and issue guidance on procedures that would govern […]

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11/13/2001

“On November 13, 2001…President Bush issued a military order formally appointing the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] as the ‘detention authority’ for captured prisoners and for establishing the outlines of a justice system to try them. The order was the product of a series of discussions between White House and Justice Department lawyers. The President’s […]

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11/13/2001

“On November 13, 2001, President Bush issued a sweeping and highly controversial Military Order for the purpose of creating military commissions with exclusive jurisdiction to try certain designated foreign nationals ‘for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws’ relevant to any prior or future ‘acts of international terrorism.’ The Order reached far […]

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11/13/2001

“In November [13] 2001, despite the fact that Al-Jazeera had given the U.S. military coordinates of its office in Kabul [Afghanistan], U.S. war planes dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on Al-Jazeera’s bureau there, destroying it. [According to an article that ran that day in News Alert] The United States claimed the office was ‘a known Al […]

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11/13/2001

“The United States planned not only to detain Taliban and al Qaeda fighters at GTMO [Guantanamo] but also, as President Bush announced on November 13, 2001, to try some of them in military commissions. Military commissions lack a jury and other procedural protections that accompany ordinary civilian trials. They are traditional wartime tools used to […]

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11/13/2001

On November 13, 2001, “President Bush issued an executive order which stated: ‘International terrorists, including members of al Qaeda, have carried out attacks on United States diplomatic and military personnel and facilities abroad and on citizens and property with the United States on a scale that has created a state of armed conflict that requires […]

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11/13/2001

“On November 13 [2001], [Vice President Dick] Cheney brought a four-page text of the directive [detailing how to treat prisoners of war on terror] to his weekly private lunch with the president [Bush], who signed it later that day in the Oval Office without even taking time to sit down. Almost no one else saw […]

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11/12/2001

Former FBI antiterror official John O’Neill “explains the failure [to confront Saudi Arabia over Osama bin Laden] in one word: oil.”  – Ethan Bronner, “Oil Diplomacy Muddled U.S. Pursuit of bin Laden, New Book Contends,” The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2001 […]

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11/12/2001

“President [Bill] Clinton as reported in USA Today (November 12, 2001) reflected his frustration by noting ‘I tried to take bin Laden out…the last four years I was in office.’ ”  – Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies, Page 204 […]

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11/12/2001

According to a November 12, 2001, article in USA Today: “President [Bill] Clinton reiterated that same Justice Department opinion on bin Laden. ‘We couldn’t indict him then [in February 1996] because he hadn’t killed anybody in America,’ the former president said. ‘He hadn’t done anything to us.’ ”  – Peter Lance, Triple Cross, Page 222 […]

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