“When the National Security Council of the new Bush administration held its first deputies meeting on terrorism in April 2001, Richard Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism adviser, talked about the urgent need to go after bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, according to Clarke’s memoirs. [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was […]
4/15/2001
“President Bush’s Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that ‘Iraq remains a destabilising influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East’ and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US ‘military intervention’ is necessary. Vice-president Dick Cheney, who chairs the White House Energy Policy Development Group, commissioned a report on […]
4/15/2001
” ‘If President Bush doesn’t help us,’ he [Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud] told a press conference in Strasbourg [France] a few days later [following his April 2001 meeting in Paris with American diplomats], ‘then the terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon–and it will be too late.’ ” [The 15th […]
4/15/2001
In April 2001, “al Qaeda cells were raided in Milan, Frankfurt, and London. The FBI’s John O’Neill was quoted as saying, ‘we are getting a lot of intel from each one.’ But the raids only confirmed the unsettling truth: ‘al Qaeda cells [were] everywhere.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes […]
4/15/2001
“In April [2001] the U.S. intelligence community learned from a source with terrorist connections that Osama bin Laden was interested in using commercial pilots in future attacks. The source said that law enforcement investigators should consider the possibility of ‘spectacular and traumatic’ attacks akin to the first WTC bombing. No time frame for an upcoming […]
4/9/2001
In a CNN interview on November 10, 2001, “Czech prime minister Milos Zeman confirmed the meeting [of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani in Prague, on April 9, 2001], but added to the confusion by claiming knowledge of its contents. ‘Atta contacted some Iraq agent, not to prepare […]
4/9/2001
On October 26, 2001, “Stanislav Gross, whose agency oversees the Czech intelligence service, made a statement to reporters about [9/11 hijacker Mohamed] Atta’s activities in Prague… ‘We can confirm now that during his next [spring [April 9] 2001] trip to the Czech Republic he did have contact with an officer of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. […]
4/9/2001
“The [9/11] Commission’s staff believed that it had debunked, once and for all, the widely circulated intelligence report about the so-called Prague meeting–a supposed encounter in the Czech capital between a senior Iraq spy and Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, on April 9, 2001. The report had been circulated by the Czech intelligence service and […]
4/6/2001
“On April 6, 2001, the US closed its diplomatic missions in Paraguay, Uruguay and Ecuador following intelligence that an Al Qaeda attack was likely.” – Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda, Page 165 […]
4/6/2001
“Five months before Sept. 11, the government warned airlines that Middle Eastern terrorists could try to hijack or blow up a U.S. plane and that carriers should ‘demonstrate a high degree of alertness.’ The warning, obtained Saturday [May 18, 2002] by the AP [Associated Press], came out after the April 6, 2001, conviction of Ahmed […]