On September 10, 2001, “when the FBI asked Attorney General [John] Ashcroft for an increase of $58 million in its counterterrorism budget, he turned them down. Acting FBI Director Tom Picard was later quoted as saying, ‘Before September 11th, I couldn’t get half an hour on terrorism with Ashcroft. He was only interested in three […]
9/10/2001
Attorney General John “Ashcroft had the bad timing–on September 10 [2001]–of rejecting the FBI’s request for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents, 200 additional analysts, and 54 extra translators.” – Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page 175 […]
9/10/2001
“…on September 10, 2001, there were fewer FBI agents assigned to counterterrorism than there had been in [August] 1998 at the time of the East Africa embassy bombings.” – Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page 161 […]
9/10/2001
“Osama bin Laden telephoned his mother in Syria the day before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks [September 10, 2001] to tell her that he could not meet her there because ‘something big’ was imminent that would end their communications for a long time, a senior foreign official said tonight [October 2, 2001].” – Patrick E. […]
9/10/2001
“Whoever [Mustafa Ahmed] al-Hisawi is, it is a matter of record that someone with a Dubai identity card with his name on it opened a bank account at a Standard and Chartered Bank branch in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Hisawi used that bank account to transmit tens of thousands of dollars to Mohammed […]
9/10/2001
“By September 10, 2001, CIA had more than one hundred sources and subsources, and relationships with eight tribal networks spread across Afghanistan.” – George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, Page 208 […]
9/10/2001
Then-CIA Director George Tenet wrote: “On September 10 [2001], a source we [CIA] were jointly running with a Middle Eastern country went to see his foreign handler and basically told him that something big was about to go down. The handler dismissed him. Had we known it at the time, however, it would have sounded […]
9/10/2001
FBI Director Louis Freeh said, of the FBI’s unpreparedness for 9/11: “We were in the Dark Ages. The most basic wonders of the computer revolution had not yet arrived at the Bureau. My guess is that the average twelve-year-old sitting at a desktop PC anywhere in America on the evening of September 10, 2001, had […]
9/10/2001
“In late 2000, [Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet recognized the deficiency of strategic analysis against al Qaeda. To tackle the problem within the CTC [Counterterrorism Center] he appointed a senior manager, who briefed him in March 2001 on ‘creating a strategic assessment capability.’ The CTC established a new strategic assessments branch during July 2001. […]
9/10/2001
Before the 9/11 attacks took place, the Deputies Committee was already considering using U.S. covert action to overthrow the Taliban. “By the end of a deputies meeting on September 10 [2001], officials formally agreed on a three-phase strategy.” The final phase said that if the Taliban’s policy did not change, “the United States would try […]