“Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora [in Afghanistan in December 2001] was a touchy subject, a deflating counter to all the brave talk of ‘dead or alive’ that had launched the war on terror. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld’s solution was to cast doubt on the possibility that bin Laden had been there at all, […]
4/17/2002
“On April 17 [2002], The Washington Post printed the first, preliminary report suggesting how the U.S. Army had failed to surround the Tora Bora caves [in Afghanistan in December 2001] and that such a move might have prevented bin Laden from escaping. That day, at a press conference, [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld disputed that […]
4/16/2002
“On April 16, 2002, Walter Pincus in The Washington Post reported Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as saying about [weapons] inspectors [in Iraq] that ‘for the most part anything they found was a result of having been cued to something as a result of a defector giving them a heads-up.’ “ – Hans Blix, Disarming […]
4/15/2002
“A yearlong State Department study [the Future of Iraq Project] predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with [Bush] administration and Congressional officials. Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and […]
4/15/2002
“Mr. [Binyam] Mohamed, who was born in Ethiopia and moved to Britain as a teenager, was apprehended in Pakistan in April 2002 as he was trying to leave the country with a falsified British passport. He had been in Afghanistan and had undergone military training, which he said was to prepare him to fight in […]
4/15/2002
From the Chilcot inquiry, the British public inquiry into their involvement in the war in Iraq: “Witnesses to the inquiry have indicated that [Prime Minister Tony] Blair made clear to [President] Bush from April 2002, nearly a year before the invasion, that he was committed to overthrowing Saddam Hussein with or without UN security council […]
4/15/2002
In a video released by Al Jazeera on April 15, 2002, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman “Al-Zawahiri claimed: ‘Those 19 hijackers who went out and worked and sacrificed their lives for God, God granted their conquest that we enjoy today. The great victory that was achieved was because of God’s help and not because of our […]
4/15/2002
Former FBI agent Ali Soufan was interviewed for a Newsweek article on April 25, 2009. He spoke about the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on captured al Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah in April 2002. “As Soufan tells the story, he challenged a CIA official at the scene about the agency’s legal authority to […]
4/15/2002
In April 2002, the State Department “set in motion a series of meetings and working groups made up of Iraqi exiles, which examined various aspects of Iraq’s society and economy, and prepared a number of policy prescriptions for a possible new government in Iraq. Technical groups were organised around a number of thematic issues, including […]
4/15/2002
In April 2002, President “Bush had invited [U.K. Prime Minister Tony] Blair to spend a weekend at his ranch in Crawford [Texas]. …’The U.K. would support military action to bring about regime change [in Iraq],’ Blair agreed, ‘provided that certain conditions were met,’ according to a secret British government record of the meeting. The conditions […]