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 […]
Category: quotes
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 […]
9/10/2001
On September 4, 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice met with Bush administration principals to devise a plan to go after al-Qaeda. “Six days later, on September 10 [2001], Rice forwarded the al-Qaeda strategy to Bush, while her deputy, Stephen Hadley, convened the number-two officials of the national security departments to advance a separate but […]
9/10/2001
“In late 2000, [Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet recognized the deficiency of strategic analysis against al Qaeda. To tackle the problem within the CTC [Counterterrorism Center] he appointed a senior manager, who briefed him in March 2001 on ‘creating a strategic assessment capability.’ The CTC established a new strategic assessments branch during July 2001. […]
9/10/2001
FBI Director Louis Freeh said, of the FBI’s unpreparedness for 9/11: “We were in the Dark Ages. The most basic wonders of the computer revolution had not yet arrived at the Bureau. My guess is that the average twelve-year-old sitting at a desktop PC anywhere in America on the evening of September 10, 2001, had […]
9/10/2001
Then-CIA Director George Tenet wrote: “On September 10 [2001], a source we [CIA] were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down. The handler dismissed him. Had we known it at the time, however, it would have sounded […]
9/10/2001
“By September 10, 2001, CIA had more than one hundred sources and subsources, and relationships with eight tribal networks spread across Afghanistan.” – George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, Page 208 […]