On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, President Bush spoke from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska with his advisers in Washington, D.C., via videoconference. ” ‘We’re at war,’ Bush began. ‘We will find these people and they will suffer the consequence of taking on this nation. We will do what it takes.’ ” – […]
Category: quotes
9/11/2001
On the morning of September 11, 2001, “At 9:25, [Federal Aviation Administration’s head Jane] Garvey, in an historic and admirable step, and almost certainly after getting an okay from the White House, initiated a national ground stop, which forbids takeoffs and requires planes in the air to get down as soon as reasonable. The order, […]
9/11/2001
Regarding September 11, 2001, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said: “…until today I had not ever briefed the President [Bush] on terrorism, only [Vice President Dick] Cheney, [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice, and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell. We had finally had our first Principals meeting on terrorism only a week earlier [on September 4]. The […]
9/11/2001
“Disturbingly, the story [President] George W. Bush often tells of his learning of the [9/11] attacks cannot possibly be true. ‘I was sitting outside of the classroom [on September 11, 2001], waiting to go in,’ he told an audience in Florida on December 4, 2001, ‘and I saw an airplane hit the tower–the TV was […]
9/11/2001
“Because the attack [on September 11, 2001] caught the entire intelligence community by complete surprise, the information reaching the President [Bush] on Air Force One was a jumble of disparate facts, rumors, and hypotheticals. There were only questions and no answers. The most reliable information was coming not from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA […]
9/11/2001
According to presidential advisor Karl Rove, when President Bush was evacuated from Florida on Air Force One on the morning of September 11, 2001, “Almost immediately after we were airborne, Vice President [Dick] Cheney phoned with a tough decision for Bush to make. The Air Force had scrambled to put up a combat jet patrol […]
9/11/2001
As the hijackers checked in at Dulles International Airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, “Both [Khalid al-] Mihdhar and [Majed] Moqed were flagged by CAPPS [Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System], but since Mihdhar had no checked luggage and Moqed wasn’t carrying any explosives, the procedures had no effect on their mission.” – James Bamford, […]
9/11/2001
“According to the government, UA [United Airlines Flight] 93 crashes at 10:03 [on September 11, 2001], just north of the Somerset County Airport, about eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania], 124 miles or fifteen minutes from Washington, D.C. The [cockpit voice] recording appears to end a minute before the official crash time. But a U.S. […]
9/11/2001
“In a brief televised press conference at 6:40 that evening [September 11, 2001], in which [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld’s calm demeanor impressed viewers, veteran Reuters Pentagon correspondent Charlie Aldinger asked, ‘Mr. Secretary, did you have any inkling at all, in any way, that something of this nature and something of this scope might be […]
9/11/2001
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, President Bush spoke from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska with his advisers in Washington, D.C. via videoconference. CIA Director George “Tenet told him it did indeed look as if al-Qaeda were responsible [for the terrorist attacks]. A check of the manifests of the four hijacked planes had […]