“On December 19, 2000, the [UN Security] council adopted UNSCR [United Nations Security Council Resolution] 1333 targeting Pakistan more directly: it called on all states to cease providing arms and ammunition to the Taliban, prohibit the training of Taliban fighters by their nationals, halt any advisory support to the Taliban military, and withdraw any advisers […]
12/16/2000
“When [President-elect George] Bush visited the White House on December 16, 2000, for the first time, [President Bill] Clinton had briefed him on ‘the biggest security problems’ he would face. Of the six major threats Clinton listed, three involved al Qaeda and Pakistan. These were al Qaeda itself, nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan and […]
12/15/2000
According to a top secret report from Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet on March 19, 2004: “CIA submitted a revised strategic proposal on counterterrorism to the NSC [National Security Council] staff in December 2000 that would have significantly expanded our activities [redacted] It was too late for the departing Clinton administration to take action […]
12/15/2000
“In [December] 2000 a National Intelligence Estimate on worldwide biological weapons [BW] threats contained this key judgment: ‘Despite a decade-long international effort to disarm Iraq, new information suggests that Baghdad has continued and expanded its offensive BW program by establishing a large scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent production capability. We judge that Iraq maintains […]
12/15/2000
“A summary of [Al Qaeda commander Ibn al Shaykh] al Libi’s debriefing in the [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith memo [on October 27, 2003] reports that ‘two al Qaeda operatives were sent to Iraq for CBW [chemical/biological weapons] related training beginning in Dec 2000.’ Iraqi intelligence, he said, had been ‘encouraged’ by the successful [African] […]
12/15/2000
In December 2000, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke developed a document titled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects“: “[T]he paper warned that Al Qaeda had a network of terrorist groups in the United States and forty other countries and was ‘actively seeking to develop and acquire weapons of […]
12/15/2000
In a December 2000 interview, Montasser al-Zayyat, the unofficial spokesman of the Islamic Group, was asked about al Qaeda second-in-command Dr. Awman al-Zawahiri. “…It was in the course of treating the mujahideen during the Afghan war, al-Zayyat said, that al-Zawahiri converted a certain rich young Saudi [Osama bin Laden] ‘from primarily a donor of money […]
12/15/2000
According to a December 2000 interview with Yemen’s Former Deputy Prime Minister, Abdul Wahab al-Anesi: “The older generation of Islamist radicals, such as Palestinian Abdullah Azzam…studied at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the Oxford of Islamic learning. By contrast, the men attracted to bin Laden’s standard…are more likely to have studied technical subjects such as medicine and […]
12/15/2000
“The [National Intelligence] estimate [produced in December 2000] concluded that Iraq had stockpiled up to 100 tons of mustard gas and Sarin nerve agents, had stepped up its efforts to buy industrial equipment for military purposes, and had expanded its civilian chemical industry to support a clandestine weapons program. Regarding germ warfare, the report asserted […]
12/15/2000
“In December 2000, the CIA and other intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate entitled ‘Iraq: Steadily Pursuing WMD Capabilities,’ a document intended to be a comprehensive and authoritative account of what the best and the brightest among the U.S. intelligence community had been able to establish about their past and potential future adversary.” [The […]