In December 1999, journalist Peter Bergen interviewed bureau chief of The News Rahimullah Yusufzai, in Peshawar, Pakistan. “Rahimullah confirmed my sense that the Taliban were not necessarily the ardent fans of bin Laden that their public statements had suggested, ‘I have privately heard some criticism,’ he said. ‘They say sarcastically, *Even after the war [against […]
12/15/1999
In an interview in December 1999, Taliban official Maulvi Hafeezullah said: ” ‘We will never hand over bin Laden. The U.S. has made a monster out of one man. We can unleash a *heroin bomb* to match your nuclear bomb.’ This was a nod to the fact that Afghanistan, under the Taliban, had been recently […]
12/15/1999
In December 1999, “Operation Able Danger commences. It’s a secret data mining operation ordered by Joint Chiefs chairman Hugh Shelton and General Pete Schoomaker, the head of the army’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The Army’s Land Information Warfare Facility (LIWA) searches the Internet for open-source intelligence on al Qaeda. The liaison to the DIA is […]
12/15/1999
“By December 1999, [Northern Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah] Massoud’s quixotic quest to retake Afghanistan from the Taliban had become a fantasy. And far away from his archenemy bin Laden, he could also provide little useful intelligence. While one part of the CIA was bankrolling Massoud’s group, another part, the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, was warning that […]
12/15/1999
“Iraq claimed repeatedly that it had got rid of all its WMD in 1991. The UN review that established the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in December 1999, following the withdrawal of the previous inspectors in 1998, recognised that this might be true but needed to be verified.” [The 15th of the […]
12/15/1999
CIA Director George Tenet “bragged that the CIA had prevented at least five terrorist outrages between December 1999 and January 2000. But the reality is that both the FBI and the CIA had very little to do with stopping the so-called Millennium attacks. …The credit instead goes to an alert agent of the U.S. Customs […]
12/15/1999
“Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke strongly championed a plan to raise the reward for information leading to the arrest of bin Laden from $2.5 million to $5 million. At the time, it was the highest monetary amount allowed by federal law for a wanted man. President [Bill] Clinton agreed to Clarke’s plan. By December 1999, bin […]
12/14/1999
On December 14, 1999, “Michael Sheehan, the State Department counterterrorist chief, phoned Taliban foreign minister [Wakil Ahmed] Muttawakil with an emotional message from [President Bill] Clinton. ‘If you have an arsonist in your basement, and every night he goes out and burns down a neighbor’s house, and you know this is going on, then you […]
12/14/1999
“The December [14] 1999 arrest of Ahmed Ressam, a low-level Algerian terrorist operative, had not only helped break up the millennium terrorist plot but also had tipped the CIA to the existence of an Algerian al Qaeda network of black Africans. The result: a doubling of the known number of al Qaeda in the world, […]
12/14/1999
On December 14, 1999, “When Ahmed Ressam, the would-be bomber of Los Angeles International Airport [LAX], stepped off the ferry from Canada at Port Angeles, Washington…and was nabbed by alert Customs agents, U.S. investigators had little inkling that the arrest would prove a turning point in their understanding of al-Qaeda’s scope–of the networks that stretched […]