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
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, […]
7/10/2001
“Special Agent Ken Williams would eventually go down in history as the man who wrote the infamous ‘Phoenix Memo,’ suggesting that the FBI monitor flight schools for suspicious Middle Eastern pilots. He sent the memo to Bureau headquarters and the New York office on July 10, 2001…” – Peter Lance, 1000 Years For Revenge, Page […]
7/10/2001
In the summer of 2001, “the warnings [of an impending terrorist attack] continued to build at such a rate that the CIA’s counterterrorism team, led by Cofer Black, felt compelled to consolidate the threats into a single, strategic assessment for [CIA Director George] Tenet. On July 10 [2001], Black presented his findings to the CIA […]