On September 11, 2001, “as hijacked United Flight 93 also seemed headed toward Washington, [Vice President Dick] Cheney recommended and [President] Bush ordered that if the passenger plane approached the city it could, in an emergency situation, be shot down.” – Der Spiegel, Inside 9-11, Page 127 […]
Category: quotes
9/11/2001
Regarding reactions following the hijackings on September 11, 2001, “even if the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] had decided within the first minutes of Flight 11’s erratic behavior and loss of communication that a hijacking had taken place and alerted the military, NORAD’s rules of engagement did not permit fighter pilots to shoot down commercial aircraft. […]
9/11/2001
“On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld instructed [Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Richard] Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible [regarding the perpetrators of the attacks]. The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in […]
9/11/2001
“At 8:30 p.m. [on September 11, 2001], [President] Bush sat down at his desk in the Oval Office, looked into a camera lens, and told Americans, ‘Our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts’ and ‘thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable […]
9/11/2001
As the attacks were taking place on September 11, 2001, NSA (National Security Agency) director Michael Hayden “ordered the counterterrorism unit to focus their attention on Middle Eastern intercepts and to translate and analyze them immediately as they were received, rather than starting with the oldest in the stack first, as was normally the case. […]
9/11/2001
Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, “The North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO] immediately invoked Article 5, which meant that all nations that had signed onto the NATO agreement were now joined together in united military operations.” – Ricardo S. Sanchez with Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle, Page 143 […]
9/11/2001
“Within hours of the terror attacks on Sept. 11 [2001], law enforcement officials say, F.B.I. agents intercepted telephone calls in which suspected associates of Al Qaeda in the United States were overheard celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the following days, the officials said, agents swept in and arrested […]
9/11/2001
On September 11, 2001, “The first of the planes was reported hijacked to the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] at 8:24 a.m.; the last of them would not crash until 10:03, which meant that the supersonic military jet fighters stationed up and down the East Coast to defend American borders had at least one hour and […]
9/11/2001
According to the 9/11 Commission, on September 11, 2001: “Vice-President [Dick] Cheney issued the shoot-down order from the bunker underneath the White House shortly after 10:00 a.m. He told us that he discussed the order beforehand in a phone conversation with President Bush–who was aboard Air Force One–shortly after he entered the bunker at around […]
9/11/2001
On January 27, 2004, the 9/11 Commission “heard a tape recording of the last known words of Betty Ong, a flight attendant for American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that crashed in to the North Tower of the World Trade Center [on September 11, 2001]. Ong had used an on-board phone to call airline supervisors […]