In mid-August, 2001, CIA director George Tenet received reports from the FBI mentioning the arrest of potential terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. “Tenet figured that since it was an FBI domestic case, surely the FBI had it under control.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Philip Shenon, The Commission, Page 361 […]
Category: quotes
8/15/2001
“FBI and CIA officials were advised in August [2001] that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into this country and planning ‘a major assault on the United States,’ a high-ranking law enforcement official said Wednesday [September 19, 2001]. The advisory was passed on by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. It cautioned that it had […]
8/15/2001
On August 15, 2001, “a flight school in Minnesota contacted the local FBI field office to express concern about a student, Zacarias Moussaoui. He had asked suspicious questions about the flight patterns around New York City and whether the doors of a cockpit could be opened during flight. The local bureau quickly determined that Moussaoui […]
8/15/2001
“According to other German investigators, another intercepted phone call also offered vital information of a link… between Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan arrested in August in Minnesota after strange behavior at a flight school, and a [sic] operative in Hamburg who shared an apartment with [lead 9/11 hijacker] Mohamed Atta. …That call, dated to Mr. Zacarias Moussaoui’s […]
8/15/2001
In former CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir At the Center of the Storm, he wrote: ” ‘a few weeks after the Aug. 6 [2001] PDB [President’s Daily Briefing] was delivered, I followed it to Crawford [Texas] to make sure the president [Bush] stayed current on events.’ …If [9/11 Commission member Tim] Roemer’s suspicions were right, […]
8/15/2001
“In August [2001], aware of the need for vigilance, the C.I.A. issued another report reminding senior policy makers at the White House, Pentagon and State Department that Al Qaeda was still committed to attacking American interests.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – James Risen, “In Hindsight, C.I.A. Sees Flaws […]
8/15/2001
From the 9/11 Commission Report’s list of Operational Opportunities: “August 2001: FBI headquarters does not recognize the significance of the information regarding [suspected terrorist Zacarias] Moussaoui’s training and beliefs and thus does not take adequate action to share information, involve higher-level officials across agencies, obtain information regarding Moussaoui’s ties to al Qaeda, and give sufficient […]
8/15/2001
Pointing blame towards the ‘wall’ which prevented the sharing of information between counterintelligence and law enforcement officials, presidential advisor Karl Rove wrote: “two of the terrorists who crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11 [Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar] managed to escape FBI detection the previous month [August 2001] because an agent […]
8/15/2001
From the 9/11 Commission Report’s list of Operational Opportunities: “August 2001: the CIA does not focus on information that [9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM] is a key al Qaeda lieutenant or connect information identifying KSM as the ‘Mukhtar’ mentioned in other reports to the analysis that could have linked ‘Mukhtar’ with [9/11 conspirator] Ramzi […]
8/15/2001
“On August 15 [2001], he [head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black] concluded a briefing to the Department of Defense’s Annual Convention on Counterterrorism with the comment, ‘We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.’ “ – James Bamford, The Shadow Factory, […]