More than 40 “PDBs [President’s Daily Briefings] presented to [President] Bush from January 2001 through September 10, 2001, included reference to Bin Laden. And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about three hundred other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, or […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, former FBI Agent and new head of security at the World Trade Center “John O’Neill…told his friends that something big was going to happen. ‘We’re overdue,’ he said again.” – Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Page 401 […]
9/10/2001
“As the summer dragged on and it became increasingly clear that al Qaeda was going to strike against the U.S., possibly within the U.S., [President] Bush tasked the CIA and the military to come up with a strategy to invade Afghanistan and neutralize bin Laden. The plan, completed on September 10 [2001], was lying on […]
9/10/2001
“Attorney General John Ashcroft made terrorism a second- or even a third-tier issue, and as late as September 10 [2001], turned down a request from the FBI to increase its counterterrorism budget by $58 million.” – John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell, The Cell, Page 297 […]
9/10/2001
“On September 10, 2001…two messages in Arabic were intercepted in the course of transmission from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia. Both rang the al-Qaeda bell and were retrieved for translation and analysis. When they were read two days later one said, ‘Tomorrow is zero hour,’ and the other, ‘The match begins tomorrow.’ ” – Thomas Powers, […]
9/10/2001
“The intercepts [of al Qaeda plotters, made by the National Security Agency (NSA) on September 10, 2001] were the main reason President Bush so readily pointed to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as the terrorists who planned and carried out the [9/11] attacks. The intelligence community, through anonymous spokesmen, said analysts were not sure […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, the National Security Agency’s “electronic ears picked up two intercepts, both in Arabic, from the al Qaeda plotters. The intercepts disclosed that a major attack was set for the next day. …The discussions were between terrorists in the United States and al Qaeda operatives abroad. With the huge volume of intercepted […]
9/10/2001
“It was not until Sept. 10 [2001] that [President] Mr. Bush’s national security aides approved a three-phase strategy to eliminate Al Qaeda. The plan, which was to unfold over three to five years, envisioned a mission to the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based; increased diplomatic pressure; and covert action. Military strikes might […]
9/10/2001
From October 2000 until September 10, 2001, “a British banking compliance company had profiles on 15 of them [the 9/11 hijackers] in its files of high-risk people. Banking clients had access to the information, but the profiles evidently were never seen by U.S. agencies that might have spotted something in them to act on. …Swiss […]
9/10/2001
On September 10, 2001, Attorney General John “Ashcroft submitted his first budget. He asked for increased funds for sixty-eight programs in his Department of Justice, not one of which directly involved counterterrorism. Even worse, he rejected a request by the FBI for $58 million for 149 new counterterrorism field agents. He also proposed a $65 […]