Vice President Dick Cheney was in a bunker beneath the White House on the morning of September 11, 2001, when an unidentified aircraft was located 80 miles away from Washington, D.C.: “A military aide asked Cheney for authorization to take out the aircraft. Cheney gave it without hesitating. The military aide seemed surprised that the answer […]
Category: quotes
9/11/2001
“From insider accounts, we now know that even as the Pentagon building was still burning on the morning of September 11 [2001], the neocons were trying to blame Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for the attacks. [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld told his aide Stephen Cambone to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement: ‘Hard to get good […]
9/10/2001
“We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers [Since August 6, 2001] of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford, Texas, on August 17 and participated […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, Attorney General John “Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He asked for increased funds for sixty-eight programs in his Department of Justice, not one of which directly involved counterterrorism. Even worse, he rejected a request by the FBI for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents. He also proposed a $65 […]
9/10/2001
“Osama bin Laden telephoned his mother in Syria the day before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks [September 10, 2001] to tell her that he could not meet her there because ‘something big’ was imminent that would end their communications for a long time, a senior foreign official said tonight [October 2, 2001].” – Patrick E. […]
9/10/2001
From October 2000 until September 10, 2001, “a British banking compliance company had profiles on 15 of them [the 9/11 hijackers] in its files of high-risk people. Banking clients had access to the information, but the profiles evidently were never seen by U.S. agencies that might have spotted something in them to act on. …Swiss […]
9/10/2001
“…on September 10, 2001, there were fewer FBI agents assigned to counterterrorism than there had been in [August] 1998 at the time of the East Africa embassy bombings.” – Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page 161 […]
9/10/2001
“It was not until Sept. 10 [2001] that [President] Mr. Bush’s national security aides approved a three-phase strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda. The plan, which was to unfold over three to five years, envisioned a mission to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based; increased diplomatic pressure; and covert action. Military strikes might […]
9/10/2001
Attorney General John “Ashcroft had the bad timing–on September 10 [2001]–of rejecting the FBI’s request for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 additional analysts, and 54 extra translators.” – Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page 175 […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, the National Security Agency’s “electronic ears picked up two intercepts, both in Arabic, from the al Qaeda plotters. The intercepts disclosed that a major attack was set for the next day. …The discussions were between terrorists in the United States and al Qaeda operatives abroad. With the huge volume of intercepted […]