President-elect George W. Bush received a national security briefing by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen on January 10, 2001. “Bush received a second critical national security briefing a few days later. CIA Director George Tenet and his deputy for operation, James L. Pavitt, gave Bush, [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] […]
Category: quotes
1/15/2001
A week before Bush’s inauguration in January 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and George Bush attended a secrets briefing delivered by CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt. “They told him that bin Laden and his network were a ‘tremendous threat’ which was ‘immediate.’ There was no doubt […]
1/15/2001
“When the Hamburg [Germany] pilots [Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan el-Shehhi] returned to Florida [from the training camps in Baluchistan, Pakistan] in January [2001] their focus shifted from the general job of learning to fly airplanes to the specifics of preparing for the [9/11] attacks.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting […]
1/15/2001
When future 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah returned to Florida in January 2001, he pursued further flight training. “He practiced extensively on a simulator in Miami. He had not finished the required work the year before to get his commercial license, as [fellow hijackers Mohamed] Atta and [Marwan] el-Shehhi had done. [At the same time,] Atta […]
1/15/2001
In January 2001, “in Phoenix, Arizona, [future 9/11 hijacker] Hani Hanjour enrolled at JetTech Flight School. Instructors there worried about his poor language skills. …Hanjour held a commercial license, but his English was so bad the staff wondered how he got it and whether it was legitimate. They called local FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] inspectors, […]
1/15/2001
“It is still not clear exactly what bin Laden’s role in the [October 12, 2000 USS] Cole explosion was, but the glee he took in the attack is undeniable. In Afghanistan in January 2001, at the wedding celebration for one of his sons, bin Laden declaimed an extraordinary poem about the Cole to hundreds of […]
1/15/2001
According to a January 20, 2002, article in The Washington Post, in January 2001, outgoing Deputy National Security Advisor General Don Kerrick warned the incoming Bush Administration about the threat posed by al Qaeda. “As a courtesy, he sent a memo to the NSC [National Security Council] front office on ‘things you need to pay […]
1/15/2001
“Before September 11 [2001], General [Michael] Hayden had been especially eager to counter charges that the NSA [National Security Agency] illegally spied on E-mail and other communications of Americans. ‘I’m here to tell you that we don’t get close to the Fourth Amendment,’ he said, referring to the constitutional provision prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure…in […]
1/15/2001
“In January [2001], the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] issued an advisory to airlines and airport personnel warning that terrorists might try to hijack or destroy American aircraft. It was the first of fifteen such warnings issued in the nine months leading up to September 11.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes […]
1/15/2001
Outgoing National Security Advisor “Sandy Berger, who felt the first President Bush had failed to arrange adequate transition briefings on national security for the incoming Clinton team, vowed to run a handoff of the sort he would have wished to receive. The ‘number one’ issue on his agenda, he recalled [in his September 19, 2002 […]