Acting FBI Director Thomas “Pickard opened the next briefing, on July 12, 2001, with the latest on the CIA warnings about an al-Qaeda attack. ‘We’re at a very high level of chatter that something big is about to happen. …The CIA is very alarmed…’ ” – Philip Shenon, The Commission, Page 247 […]
Category: quotes
7/12/2001
Acting FBI Director Tom Pickard raised the concern of the threat of an al Qaeda attack in a July 5, 2001, meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft. “Yet, Pickard testified to the 9/11 commission that when he tried to brief Ashcroft just a week later, on July 12 [2001], about the terror threat inside the […]
7/12/2001
“On July 12 of that year [2001], Assistant FBI Director Dale Watson, chief of the counterterrorism division, told the National Governors Association that a significant terrorist attack was likely on U.S. soil. ‘I’m not a gloom-and-doom-type person,’ he said. ‘But I will tell you this. [We are] headed for an incident inside the United States.’ […]
7/10/2001
The FBI office in ” ‘Phoenix believes that the FBI should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities/colleges around the country,’ FBI special agent Kenneth Williams wrote to FBI headquarters…on July 10, 2001. His five-page memorandum would be a key warning that went unheeded by the FBI. If it had been acted upon, there is […]
7/10/2001
FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams’ Phoenix memo, sent to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, “warned that bin Laden might be sending terrorists to U.S. flight schools, identified two men with ties to al Qaeda, and stated that several of the men were, in FBI parlance, ‘of investigative interest.’ Several of the men had been […]
7/10/2001
Even though the Phoenix memo of July 10, 2001, by FBI Agent Kenneth Williams was sent to the FBI’s National Security Division, “the failure to act on Williams’s recommendation to investigate flight training by Islamic radicals was a blunder of monumental proportions. The information was not taken seriously by the FBI, it did not get […]
7/10/2001
FBI Director Louis Freeh wrote: “In hindsight, the Bureau might have been more responsive to the July [10] 2001 memo sent by one of our agents in Arizona [Kenneth Williams], raising a red flag about the number of Middle Eastern men enrolled in U.S. flight schools and suggesting the Bureau query civil aviation schools around […]
7/10/2001
“Because of a leak, it became known that in July [10] 2001 FBI Agent Kenneth Williams of the Phoenix field office sent a memo to Washington headquarters recommending that the FBI investigate the possibility that Islamist radicals were receiving training at American flight schools. On the basis of his investigation of an Arizona flight school, […]
7/10/2001
“In July [10] 2001, a highly regarded 41-year-old FBI counterterrorism agent in Phoenix named Kenneth Williams was investigating suspected Islamic terrorists when he noticed that several of them were taking lessons to fly airplanes. Williams became more suspicious after he heard that some of the men had been asking questions about airport security procedures. His […]
7/10/2001
On July 10, 2001, CIA Director George “Tenet and his deputies met with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy to describe for them the nature of the threat reporting that the intelligence community had been receiving. …Tenet’s staff reported that bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders had been discussing a near-term attack, […]