“…on September 11, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential Finding authorizing the CIA to create paramilitary teams to ‘hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world.’ Only by keeping that Executive Order secret could President Bush be shielded from responsibility.” – M. Cherif Bassiouni, The Institutionalization of Torture by the […]
9/11/2001
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet released a written statement for the Joint Inquiry Committee on October 17, 2002. It read: “By 11 September [2001], CIA (in many cases with the FBI) had rendered 70 terrorists to justice around the world.” – CIA, “Written Statement for the Record of the DCI,” (before the Joint Inquiry […]
9/11/2001
On the morning of September 11, 2001, “Confusion reached such a high level that the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] admitted to the White House officials who wanted to bring the President [Bush] back to Washington that the agency could not account for seven planes. In fact, four of those planes turned out to be the […]
9/11/2001
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney recalled his actions from the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House, during the terrorist attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001: “Within minutes of the [second World Trade Center] tower collapsing, I was told that another plane headed in the direction of Washington had hit the ground on […]
9/11/2001
Then-Vice President Dick Cheney recalled his actions from the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House, during the terrorist attacks on the morning of September 11, 2001: “At about 10:15, a uniformed military aide came into the room to tell me that a plane, believed hijacked, was eighty miles out and headed for D.C. […]
9/11/2001
“Within hours of the terror attacks on Sept. 11 [2001], law enforcement officials say, F.B.I. agents intercepted telephone calls in which suspected associates of Al Qaeda in the United States were overheard celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the following days, the officials said, agents swept in and arrested […]
9/11/2001
“From insider accounts, we now know that even as the Pentagon building was still burning on the morning of September 11 [2001], the neocons were trying to blame Iraq’s Saddam Hussein for the attacks. [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld told his aide Stephen Cambone to look for evidence of Iraqi involvement: ‘Hard to get good […]
9/11/2001
“At 12:05 p.m. [on September 11, 2001], CIA director George Tenet called to report that just fifteen minutes after the Pentagon had been hit, the National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted a phone call between a known associate of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and someone in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The bin […]
9/11/2001
” ‘There’s been at least three instances here where we’ve had reports of aircraft approaching Washington–a couple were confirmed hijack,’ [Vice President Dick] Cheney told [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld [on the morning of September 11, 2001]… ‘And pursuant to the President’s [Bush’s] instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out.’ Actually, the […]
9/11/2001
“In a brief televised press conference at 6:40 that evening [September 11, 2001], in which [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld’s calm demeanor impressed viewers, veteran Reuters Pentagon correspondent Charlie Aldinger asked, ‘Mr. Secretary, did you have any inkling at all, in any way, that something of this nature and something of this scope might be […]