“No president eight months into his term had ever had a lower approval rating in the polls than George W. Bush had on September 10, 2001. Within weeks his approval rating was higher than that ever enjoyed by an American president.” – Ian S. Lustick, Trapped in the War on Terror, Page 62 […]
Category: quotes
9/10/2001
“Attorney General John Ashcroft made terrorism a second- or even a third-tier issue, and as late as September 10 [2001], turned down a request from the FBI to increase its counterterrorism budget by $58 million.” – John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell, The Cell, Page 297 […]
9/10/2001
“The FBI issued 216 internal threat warnings about the possibility of an attack by al Qaeda between January [1] and September [10] 2001, while the National Security Agency reported 33 intercepts indicating possible al Qaeda attacks.” – Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos, Page 59 […]
9/10/2001
“As the summer dragged on and it became increasingly clear that al Qaeda was going to strike against the U.S., possibly within the U.S., [President] Bush tasked the CIA and the military to come up with a strategy to invade Afghanistan and neutralize bin Laden. The plan, completed on September 10 [2001], was lying on […]
9/10/2001
“One day before the Sept. 11 attacks [September 10, 2001], senior Bush administration officials agreed that the United States would try to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers if a final diplomatic push to expel Osama bin Laden from the country failed, a federal panel reported Tuesday [March 23, 2004].” – Hope Yen, “Panel: U.S. Had Plan […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, former FBI Agent and new head of security at the World Trade Center “John O’Neill…told his friends that something big was going to happen. ‘We’re overdue,’ he said again.” – Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Page 401 […]
9/10/2001
“Shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration was debating how to force bin Laden out of Afghanistan. At a Sept. 10, 2001, meeting of second-tier Cabinet officials, officials settled on a three-phase strategy. The first step called for dispatching an envoy to talk to the Taliban. If this failed, diplomatic pressure would be […]
9/10/2001
More than 40 “PDBs [President’s Daily Briefings] presented to [President] Bush from January 2001 through September 10, 2001, included reference to Bin Laden. And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about three hundred other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, or […]
9/10/2001
“On September 10 [2001], just over 300 U.S. Border Patrol agents supported by a single analyst were assigned the job of detecting and intercepting illegal border crossings along the entire vast 4,000-mile land and water border with Canada. Meanwhile, after a decade of budgetary neglect, the U.S. Coast Guard, tasked with maintaining port security and […]
9/10/2001
Before the 9/11 attacks took place, the Deputies Committee was already considering using U.S. covert action to overthrow the Taliban. “By the end of a deputies meeting on September 10 [2001], officials formally agreed on a three-phase strategy.” The final phase said that if the Taliban’s policy did not change, “the United States would try […]