“At 2:40 that afternoon [September 11, 2001], an aide to the Defense Secretary [Donald Rumsfeld] jotted notes of Rumsfeld’s conversations. Written deep in the War Room, the notes describe the Pentagon chief as wanting ‘best info fast; judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only U.B.L. [Usama bin Laden].’ ‘Go […]
9/11/2001
On September 11, 2001, “Within hours of the attacks in New York and Washington, the CIA told the White House that al Qaeda was responsible and had planned the attack from its base in Afghanistan.” – Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda, Page 78 […]
9/11/2001
The 9/11 Commission’s report “reduced to a footnote details of the three major war games being conducted on 9/11 [2001], including an exercise by the Northeast Air Defense Sector of NORAD that initially confused officials responsible for protecting New York. Worse, it ignored a remarkable account cited earlier by the commission’s own chairman, [former New […]
9/11/2001
“Because the attack [on September 11, 2001] caught the entire intelligence community by complete surprise, the information reaching the President [Bush] on Air Force One was a jumble of disparate facts, rumors, and hypotheticals. There were only questions and no answers. The most reliable information was coming not from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA […]
9/11/2001
“The attacks of September 11 [2001] represented the greatest failure of intelligence since the Trojan horse. Each of the nation’s spy agencies was responsible in part, but after an eighteen-month investigation, the evidence presented…shows that the FBI in particular had multiple opportunities to stop the devastation of 9/11 and simply failed to follow through.” – […]
9/11/2001
“How the U.S. intelligence community…missed the September 11 [2001] attacks is a story of a system hamstrung by bad politics, poor leadership, and bureaucratic ineptitude. But the most important problem…is the lack of accountability.” – Bill Gertz, Breakdown, Pages 4-5 […]
9/11/2001
“September 11 [2001] was the culmination of a long trail of American intelligence failures both at home and abroad–an almost bewildering array of mistakes, missteps, and missed opportunities caused by warring governmental cultures, bureaucratic incompetence and neglect, lack of imagination, and, perhaps, most tragic of all, a failure of leadership at the highest levels of […]
9/11/2001
Author John Miller wrote: ” ‘By the time the Towers collapsed [on September 11, 2001] in a cloud of metal and dust and humanity, I knew this had been the work of bin Laden. …It had been a long time coming. I was part of the small club, regarded by many as alarmists, who had […]
9/11/2001
“Six hours before the first crash in New York [on September 11, 2001], the Interfax news agency reported that the police in the Moscow area had been alerted ‘in connection with a large-scale operation to prevent terrorism.’ …the coincidence of the terrorist warning here suggested that Russia’s intelligence services might have been alerted to a […]
9/11/2001
Chris Yates, the aviation security editor and analyst for Jane’s Defence Weekly, explained why there were no aircraft on alert at Andrews Air Force Base (the closest base to Washington, D.C.) when the hijackings took place on September 11, 2001. “There was no reason to [be on constant alert]…The U.S. homeland had never been attacked […]