In April 2001, former senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH) “testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Technology. Hart warned, ‘The prospect of mass casualty terrorism on American soil is growing sharply’ and said the nation must embrace ‘homeland security as a primary national security mission.’ ” [The 15th of […]
Category: quotes
4/15/2001
The following exchange between counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz took place at a ‘high-level’ meeting on terrorism held in April 2001: ” ‘Wolfowitz: Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden. Clarke: We are talking about a network of terrorist […]
4/15/2001
“In April 2001, the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] funded the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, headed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, to hold a three-day International Deoband Conference near Peshawar [Pakistan]. (The Deobandi are a sect of Sunni Islam, among whose adherents are the Taliban and Pakistani extremists who believe in active jihad.) Hundreds of thousands of people attended […]
4/15/2001
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney wrote: “In April 2001, when Nick Lemann of the New Yorker magazine asked me about the nature of the threat facing the United States, I said, ‘I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of […]
4/15/2001
In April 2001, Nick Lemann of The New Yorker interviewed Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney wrote: “…Lemann asked me what we could do to reduce those [terrorist] threats [to the country]. I answered, ‘You need to have very robust intelligence capability if you’re going to uncover threats to the U.S., and hopefully thwart them before […]
4/15/2001
“In April [2001] the U.S. intelligence community learned from a source with terrorist connections that Osama bin Laden was interested in using commercial pilots in future attacks. The source said that law enforcement investigators should consider the possibility of ‘spectacular and traumatic’ attacks akin to the first WTC bombing. No time frame for an upcoming […]
4/15/2001
In April 2001, “al Qaeda cells were raided in Milan, Frankfurt, and London. The FBI’s John O’Neill was quoted as saying, ‘we are getting a lot of intel from each one.’ But the raids only confirmed the unsettling truth: ‘al Qaeda cells [were] everywhere.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes […]
4/15/2001
” ‘If President Bush doesn’t help us,’ he [Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud] told a press conference in Strasbourg [France] a few days later [following his April 2001 meeting in Paris with American diplomats], ‘then the terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon–and it will be too late.’ ” [The 15th […]
4/15/2001
“President Bush’s Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that ‘Iraq remains a destabilising influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East’ and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US ‘military intervention’ is necessary. Vice-president Dick Cheney, who chairs the White House Energy Policy Development Group, commissioned a report on […]
4/15/2001
“When the National Security Council of the new Bush administration held its first deputies meeting on terrorism in April 2001, Richard Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism adviser, talked about the urgent need to go after bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, according to Clarke’s memoirs. [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was […]