At 9:56 a.m. on September 11, 2001, “The president [Bush] leaves Sarasota, Florida. He later says that he doesn’t make any major decisions about how to respond to the 9/11 attacks until he’s in his airborne command center. This means, in effect, that the commander in chief takes almost fifty minutes after being informed that […]
Category: quotes
9/11/2001
“Four hours after a third airline crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 [2001], [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld asked his staff how the United States might be able to ‘go after Iraq as a response.’ ” – Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror, Page 63 […]
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. ” ‘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.’ ” – […]
9/11/2001
“At Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, President Bush convened the first meeting of the National Security Council for the terrorist crisis at 3:30 p.m. [on September 11, 2001]. [CIA director George] Tenet reported with near certainty that bin Laden was behind the attacks. Passenger manifests showed three known al Qaeda operatives had been on […]
9/11/2001
“According to [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s Meet the Press interview with Tim Russert on September 16 [2001], [on the morning of September 11, 2001] the Secret Service evacuated him from his office in response to ‘a report that an airplane was headed for the White House…which turned out to be Flight 77.’ As Cheney told […]
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 […]