In October 2000, “the National Commission on Terrorism, led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, reached a conclusion that was all too clear: ‘The U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities lacked the ability to prioritize, translate and understand in a timely fashion, all of the information to which they have access.” [The 15th of the month […]
Category: quotes
10/15/2000
“The armed Predator [drone] flew over Afghanistan eleven times in September and October 2000, [counterterrorism czar Richard] Clarke told the author [Richard Miniter]. It supplied hours of clear video, showing bin Laden in various compounds. In October 2000, the Predator crashed in Afghanistan. Whether it was brought down by high winds or machine gunfire, no […]
10/15/2000
“In October 2000, the president [Bill Clinton] chose not to identify bin Laden as the originator of the attack on the USS Cole, even though his own intelligence apparatus said there was no other conclusion.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Roy Gutman, How We Missed the Story, Page […]
10/15/2000
“Beginning in October 2000, as a result of extremely sloppy and questionable work by the FBI, the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court ordered the wall between the FBI’s criminal investigators and the NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] eavesdroppers heightened considerably. The court found errors in approximately one hundred applications for FISA warrants, mostly in affidavits […]
10/13/2000
“A Pentagon intelligence analyst [Kie Fallis] resigned on October 13 [2000], declaring that his warnings about al Qaeda in the region had been ignored and suppressed by his superiors. None of his analysis involved specific threats against the [USS] Cole, however. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, the former White House counterterrorism aides in [counterterrorism czar] […]
10/12/2000
“On the morning of October 12 [2000], two al Qaeda suicide bombers load a device made of C-4 explosive into a small skiff and take off across the harbor in Aden, Yemen. The U.S.S. Cole, an advanced guided missile destroyer, is at the refueling dock. As the skiff approaches the ship…the bomb detonates, blowing a […]
10/12/2000
Following the attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, on October 12, 2000, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) specialist Kie “Fallis was disgusted. For the past year he had been tracking the al Qaeda terrorist network and found that the group was intimately linked to the government of Iran. …Fallis was angry that his repeated […]
10/12/2000
“On the day the [USS] Cole bombing was carried out [October 12, 2000], NSA [National Security Agency] produced a top secret intelligence report warning that terrorists were planning an attack on an American target in the Middle East. But the NSA report was not dispatched until several hours after the bombing.” – Bill Gertz, Breakdown, […]
10/12/2000
On October 12, 2000, author Jonathan Randal recalled “the BBC World Service radio account of the near-sinking of the USS Cole, a billion-dollar missile destroyer, in a terrorist attack during a refueling stopover in Aden, Yemen’s premiere port. Piloted by two kamikazes, a speeding fiberglass skiff loaded with high explosives, arranged in a shaped charge […]
10/12/2000
” ‘We had data just days before the [October 12, 2000] [USS] Cole bombing,’ says Lt. Col. [Anthony] Shaffer, ‘that Aden [Yemen] was a hot spot. I communicated this information to SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] and they reportedly passed it on to CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command], but for unknown reasons the threat assessment was […]