Timeline
January 4, 2001
Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a political crony from Texas with no disaster-management experience, as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Enron CEO Ken Lay is named to the Bush Energy Department transition team.
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff is appointed to the transition team for the Department of the Interior. Abramoff's administrative assistant, Susan Ralston, is hired as an advisor to Karl Rove.
January 20, 2001
January 25, 2001
A memo from counterrorism expert Richard Clarke to incoming National Security Advisor Condaleeza Rice "urgently" requested a high-level National Security Council review on al-Qaeda and included two attachments: a declassified December 2000 "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects" and the September 1998 "Pol-Mil Plan for al-Qida," the so-called Delenda Plan, which remains classified.
January 30, 2001
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." Saddam's removal is the first item of Bush's inaugural national security meeting. Then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later tells journalist Ron Suskind, "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.'"
Bush also says the emphasis on Iraq will accompany a de-emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Secretary of State Colin Powell says US disengagement would give Ariel Sharon free rein and bring further suffering upon the Palestinians. According to Suskind's later book, The One Percent Doctrine, Bush replies, "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things."
February 5, 2001
February 9, 2001
A United States submarine strikes a Japanese fishing boat off the coast of Hawaii, killing nine crewmembers, including four high-school students. Reports later show that civilians were on board the submarine, with two actually at the controls at the time of the accident. Speculation abounds that the civilians were Republican political donors affiliated with the Texas oil industry.
February 14, 2001
Exxon vice president James Rouse meets with Dick Cheney's task force on energy policy. It was the first meeting in which, according to a White House document later discovered by the Washington Post, oil executives "gave detailed energy policy recommendations" to the White House.
February 16, 2001
US and British jets bomb targets outside the Iraqi no-fly zone, near Baghdad. Bush says the strikes are intended "to send a clear signal to Saddam."
February 24, 2001
Colin Powell, on a visit to Egypt, says that Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
February 26, 2001
L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, former chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism and later head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, comments presciently at a conference, "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'"
February 27, 2001
Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio turns down what he considers an illegal request from the NSA for customer call records, suggesting Bush's domestic spying plan was in place no more than seven days after he took office, not after September 11 as he will later claim.
March 5, 2001
A Pentagon document dated March 5, 2001 and titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" includes a map of areas for potential exploration. It is brought to light by Ron Suskind in his book The Price of Loyalty. "It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries," Suskind will tell CBS. "And which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."
March 11, 2001
The Palm Beach Post reports its findings of a study of votes cast in Palm Beach County, concluding that voters confused by a "butterfly ballot" (which illegal under Florida election laws) "cost Al Gore the presidency." The newspaper's review of the overvotes found 5,330 Palm Beach County residents invalidated their ballots by punching chads for Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. The hole voters punched for Buchanan was located just above Gore's on the two-page ballot. Bush won Florida by a 537-vote margin in official results, giving him a 271-267 majority in the Electoral College.
March 13, 2001
Although he made campaign promises in 2000 to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, one of George Bush's first acts as president is to pull the US out of the Kyoto accords. Bush dismisses the Kyoto Protocol as too costly, describing it as "an unrealistic and ever-tightening straitjacket." Later, the White House questions the validity of the science behind global warming, and claims that millions of jobs will be lost if the US joins in this world pact.
March 21, 2001
The Environmental Protection Agency seeks to withdraw Clinton administration-approved rules to lower the limit for arsenic in drinking water until more study is done. "While scientists agree that the previous standard of 50 parts per billion should be lowered, there is no consensus on a particular safe level," EPA Administrator Christie Whitman says.
Chairman of Conoco Archie Dunham meets with Cheney's energy task force.
March 22, 2001
Energy task force staffers meet with BP regional president Bob Malone, BP chief economist Peter Davies, and two BP employees.
April 9, 2001
The date Mohammad Atta allegedly meets with senior Iraqi intelligence officials at the Iraqi embassy in Prague. The 9/11 Report (Section 7) will later debunk this claim: "The FBI has gathered evidence indicating that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 (as evidenced by a bank surveillance camera photo), and in Coral Springs, Florida, on April 11, where he leased an apartment. On April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida. No evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001."
Dick Cheney will nevertheless repeatedly invoke the meeting as evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
April 10, 2001
A report containing research provided by a CIA analyst known only as "Joe" reaches top Bush administration officials. It claims that aluminum tubes being sought by Iraq are meant for uranium centrifuges. The assessment is immediately challenged by the Energy Department, which builds centrifuges and runs the government's nuclear weapons programs. The New York Times in 2004 will report, "The next day, Energy Department officials ticked off a long list of reasons why the tubes did not appear well suited for centrifuges. Simply put, the analysis concluded that the tubes were the wrong size - too narrow, too heavy, too long - to be of much practical use in a centrifuge."
April 12, 2001
Conoco official Alan Huffman and officials from the US Oil and Gas Association meet with Cheney's energy task force. Huffman will later confirm the meeting, saying, "We met in the Executive Office Building, if I remember correctly."
April 12, 2001
Royal Dutch/Shell Group chairman Sir Mark Moody-Stuart and Shell Oil chairman Steven Miller meet with energy task force staffers.
April 17, 2001
James Lee, vice-president of ChoicePoint (formerly DBT), the company hired to purge felons from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 elections, testifies that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90% of a last name. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non-felons).
Lee goes on to say that the state then ordered DBT to shift to an even lower threshold of 80% match, allowing also names to be reversed (thus a person named Thomas Clarence could be taken to be the same as Clarence Thomas). Besides this, middle initials were skipped, Jr. and Sr. suffixes dropped, and some nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list.
"DBT told state officials," Lee testifies, "that the rules for creating the [purge] list would mean a significant number of people who were not deceased, not registered in more than one county, or not a felon, would be included on the list. DBT made suggestions to reduce the numbers of eligible voters included on the list". According to Lee, to this suggestion the state told the company, "Forget about it".
"The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant... they told them what would happen," Lee says. "The state expected the county supervisors to be the failsafe." Lee said his company will never again get involved in cleansing voting rolls. "We are not confident any of the methods used today can guarantee legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote," Lee tells a group of Atlanta-area black lawmakers in March 2001.
April 30, 2001
According to Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, Paul Wolfowitz challenges Clarke at a meeting: "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack in New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages doesn't mean that they don't exist."
Early May, 2001
The first members of the "Lackawanna Six," young Yemeni men raised in Lackawanna, NY, leave for Afghanistan. A few weeks later, the others will follow. In an Al Qaeda training camp, they have a brief encounter with Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. One of the members, increasingly uneasy, fakes a leg injury to get out. The others soon follow.
May 9, 2001
The Energy Department proposes an alternative explanation for the aluminum tubes that CIA analyst "Joe" claims are for nuclear purposes. According to a later New York Times account, "It turned out, [the Department of Energy] reported, that Iraq had for years used high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of those tubes, also made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making rockets. According to the international agency, the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length, with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick. The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a perfect match."
May 24, 2001
Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont leaves the Republican Party, becoming an independent and throwing control of the Senate to the Democratic Party for the first time since 1994."Increasingly I find myself in disagreement with my party," he said. Sources close to the senator said he has been feeling more and more isolated by the Bush administration, especially after he was not invited to a White House event honoring a Vermont teacher as "Teacher of the Year." Republicans had been whispering about making Jeffords pay a price for disloyalty because of his previous opposition to Bush's full tax cut.
July 10, 2001
On or around this date, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is briefed by CIA director George Tenet and counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black about terror threats. Bob Woodward, in his book State of Denial, reports that Tenet and Black decided they had to request a dramatic, "out-of-cycle" meeting with Rice to convey their anxiety over the chance of an attack against American interests, possibly within the United States. It was, according to Woodward, the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Rice, in Woodward's account, was "polite," but Tenet and Black "felt the brush-off."
When Woodward's book comes out in October 2006, Rice denies that the meeting--which the State Dept. confirms took place--was exceptional, and disputes Woodward's characterization. "What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States," she says. "And the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."
July 29, 2001
Condoleezza Rice says of Saddam, "We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." However, she says, the administration will continue to apply "pressure."
August 6, 2001
Bush receives a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.". FBI information, it said, "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."
Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine will report that a CIA officer flew to Bush's ranch to call the President's attention to the document. After the briefing, Bush says, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."
August 9, 2001
Bush bans federal funding for new embryonic stem-cell research beyond any existing stem-cell lines. As part of his justification, Bush claims there are 60 existing stem-cell lines which should be sufficient for any research needs. A year later it is revealed there are actually only 22 lines, many of which have degraded to the point where they can no longer be used, but Bush will not be shaken from his position.
August 16, 2001
9/11 plotter Zacharias Moussaui is arrested on immigration charges after the instructor at the flying school he is attending in Minnesota becomes suspicious of his behaviour.
August 17, 2001
A team of scientists at the Energy Department revisits the question of the aluminum tubes after US intelligence intercepts a shipment. They raise significant doubts in a "Technical Intelligence Note." The New York Times later summarizes: "First, in size and material, the tubes were very different from those Iraq had used in its centrifuge prototypes before the first Gulf War. Those models used tubes that were nearly twice as wide and made of exotic materials that performed far better than aluminum .. Their walls were three times too thick for 'favorable use' in a centrifuge .. They were also anodized, meaning they had a special coating to protect them from weather. Anodized tubes, the team pointed out, are 'not consistent' with a uranium centrifuge because the coating can produce bad reactions with uranium gas. In other words, [if the Iraqis intended the tubes for use in building centrifuges, it meant they had] chosen to forsake years of promising centrifuge work and instead start from scratch, with inferior material built to less-than-optimal dimensions."
September 2001
Iraqi defector "Curveball," granted asylum in Germany, ceases cooperating with German intelligence officials. The CIA assures the Germans that they have other sources that corroborate Curveball's claims that Iraq has at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. The reality is that they have three, and all three will be proven to be frauds. Two have connections to Ahmed Chalabi.
September 10, 2001
Top bureau officials at FBI headquarters in Washington refused to support requests by field agents, who already have 9/11 plotter Zacharias Moussaoui in custody, for warrants to search Moussaoui's belongings and residences in Minnesota and Oklahoma.
Investigators were desperate for a break and sensed a terrorist action involving airliners might be moving forward based on Moussaoui's unusual behavior, FBI Special Agent Harry Samit later told jurors at Moussaoui's trial.
Still lacking authority for a fuller search of Moussaoui's belongings, federal authorities cut an unusual deal with French officials Sept. 10, Samit said. Under terms of that agreement, Moussaoui would be deported to his native France, and French authorities would conduct a search of his luggage and computer. Suicide hijackers launched their attacks the next day, and the transfer never occurred.
The National Security Agency intercepts a message (not translated until Sept. 12): "The match is about to begin" and "Tomorrow is the zero hour." Three years later it will be revealed that the FBI still hasn't translated 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings.
In a lengthy speech that day to Pentagon workers, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says that there is an "adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America." Rumsfeld says it is an enemy "more subtle and more implacable" than the former Soviet Union, and is "closer to home" than "the last decrepit dictators of the world." He is speaking of Pentagon bureaucracy.
September 11, 2001
Almost 3,000 people die in airplane attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and on an airliner that crashes in Pennsylvania. Dick Cheney issues a shoot-down order, claiming that he did so on orders from the President. The 9/11 Commission is unable to find evidence of such a call.
President Bush, after being informed that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center and that there is no doubt that the United States is under attack, responds by continuing to sit silently for seven minutes as Florida schoolchildren read to him from My Pet Goat. "He looked like he was going to cry," a student later recalls.
When the reading lesson was over, according to a the Washington Times' Bill Sammons, Bush lingered, telling the children to stay in school and pose for photos. When a reporter asked if he knew what was going on in New York, Bush simply dismissed the question: "I'll talk about it later." He spent some more time in the classroom "as if he didn't have a care in the world...in the most relaxed manner imaginable."
A note from an aide who was with the Secretary of Defense at the National Military Command Center shows that just five hours after the attacks Rumsfeld says, "Best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
A member of the "Lackawanna Six" - a group of young Yemeni men raised in New York State who met with bin Laden at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in May 2001 - calls a local FBI agent to offer his assistance.
September 12, 2001
According to Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, Bush collars Clarke and says, "I know you have a lot to do and all, but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way." Clarke responds, "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this." Bush tells him, "I know, I know, but -- see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred...."
September 12-16, 2001
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructs the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it is safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality is not available.
September 16, 2001
The following exchange takes place between journalist Tim Russert and Vice President Dick Cheney on Meet the Press:
TIM RUSSERT: Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to 9/11?
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: No.
Mid-September 2001
The United States greatly expands the practice of "extraordinary rendition" whereby individuals suspected of having information are sent to countries known to torture prisoners.
September 17, 2001
At a press conference, Bush is asked: "Do you want bin Laden dead?"
Bush replies: "I want justice. There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"
Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signs a document outlining the war on terror. In a minor note, the document directs the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq. He also signs a "sweeping finding that gives the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world," according to a later account in the Washington Post.
September 18, 2001
In a move a federal judge will later call "conscience-shocking," EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman announces that the thousands of pounds of hazardous materials released into the air after the World Trade Center collapse pose no health risk to residents of the area around Ground Zero. It is the third time since the attacks that the EPA has issued such a sentiment. Subsequent news reports and lawsuits will show that Whitman acted at the behest of the White House, and that relevant studies had not been completed. Tens of thousands of people suffer "debilitating health problems" related to the attacks, according to Newsweek.
Five letters containing anthrax are believed to have been sent on or around this date. All five are sent to offices of news media organizations in New York City. Over the course of the next several months, 22 people will contract anthrax.
Ahmed Chalabi is a guest speaker at a two-day meeting at the Pentagon of the Defense Policy Board, an influential body packed with high-level Defense officials and opinion makers and chaired by Richard Perle, according to an article in Vanity Fair ("The Path to War," May 2004),
September 19, 2001
President Bush tells CIA chief George Tenet, "I want to know about links between Saddam and al Qaeda. The Vice President knows some things that might be helpful."
September 20, 2001
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, on this date undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith writes to Donald Rumsfeld and "expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. [He] suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq."
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair meet for a private White House dinner. According to the former British Ambassador to Washington, Blair tells Bush not to get distracted from the war on terror. Bush replies, "I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq."
A letter to President Bush from the neoconservative Project for the New American Century says, "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." New Republic editor Marty Peretz signs on.
September 21, 2001
President Bush is informed in a highly classified briefing that the US intelligence community cannot link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and that there is little evidence pointing to collaborative ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Under a rule imposed without public announcement soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, immigration courts from coast to coast are conducting scores of hearings in secret, with court officials forbidden even to confirm that the cases exist. The rule is imposed in an internal memorandum by the country's chief immigration judge, Michael Creppy. Acting at the behest of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, Creppy ordered that all "special interest" deportation hearings be closed to all visitors, family members and news reporters.
In a memo to the White House, John Yoo of the Justice Department writes that in the face of catastrophic attack "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties." If the president decided to deploy the military inside the country, then "the Fourth Amendment should be no more relevant than it would be in cases of invasion or insurrection."
Shortly after September 11th, Vice President Dick Cheney asks Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to look into the claim that Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent. Tenet puts the Directorate of Operations Jim Pavitt on the case, who reports back to Tenet. On September 21st, 2001, Tenet tells the President, "Our Prague office is skeptical about the report. It just doesn't add up." Tenet also indicates that other evidence the CIA was able to find, including credit card and telephone records indicating Atta was in Virginia during that time, make such a meeting highly unlikely.
Cheney, however, will continue to cite the alleged meeting in public appearances.
September 25, 2001
The Justice Department's John Yoo puts forward an early version of the doctrine of preemption in a memo to the White House. The president has the "constitutional power to take such military actions as he deems necessary and appropriate to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States." Those actions can be wide-ranging and cannot be controlled by Congress: "Military actions need not be limited to those individuals, groups, or states that participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: the Constitution vests the President with the power to strike terrorist groups or organizations that cannot be demonstrably linked to the September 11 incidents, but that, nonetheless, pose a similar threat to the security of the United States and the lives of its people, whether at home or overseas. In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President's authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make."
October 2001
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA receives a report from Italian intelligence describing a public visit by an Iraqi diplomat to Niger in 1999 and suggesting that the diplomat's covert purpose was to procure yellowcake uranium. The American intelligence community dismisses the report as "amateurish and unsubstantiated" but it is nevertheless sent directly to the Vice President. It is the one of the first examples of "stovepiping," the practice whereby Bush officials, in the words of former National Security Council member Kenneth Pollack, "dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership."
The NSA domestic wiretapping program goes into operation. (Official presidential authorization will come in early 2002.) The program grants NSA officers authority to select US citizens for surveillance without a warrant or court approval.
The first report on the program, by James Risen of the New York Times, in December 2005, says the program covers only calls to or from other countries. President Bush acknowledges the program and says, "One end of the communication must be outside the United States." Further disclosures in 2006 reveal that domestic calls were also covered, and that the NSA possesses the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom are not suspected of any crime. "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," says one source.
In April 2004, before the program becomes public, President Bush says, "any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order."
October 1, 2001
On the cover of its first post-9/11 issue, the Weekly Standard runs the word WANTED under pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
October 5, 2001
A 63-year-old photo editor at a Florida publication is the first of five people to die after coming in contact with anthrax. It is the first case of inhalation anthrax in the US in over two decades. A massive FBI investigation will continue for years and produce no arrests.
October 7, 2001
President Bush announces Operation Enduring Freedom, aimed at dismantling Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which is harboring al Qaeda.
Bush writes a letter to his father, telling him that he has ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. He concludes, "I feel no sense of the so-called heavy burden of the office."
October 8, 2001
The Office of Homeland Security is established, later to become the Department of Homeland Security. The move brings various security-related agencies together under one roof...yet, strangely, exempted from the reorganization are the FBI, which so notoriously mishandled the investigation of suspects prior to the 9/11 attacks, and the CIA, which, it will be later discovered, bugnled and distorted intelligence used to build support for the Iraq war.
October 9, 2001
Letters carrying anthrax are mailed to the offices of Sens. Daschle and Leahy.
October 11, 2001
The FBI, citing "certain information," warns of a terrorist attack in "the next several days."
October 12, 2001
The New York City Department of Health announces that an NBC employee has contracted anthrax. USPS says it will offer gloves and masks to all employees who handle mail.
October 15, 2001
A letter testing positive for anthrax is opened at Senator Daschle's office.
October 17, 2001
Congress is shut down after 31 Senate staffers test positive for exposure to anthrax.
October 18, 2001
A number of people, including USPS employees and a CBS employee, test positive for anthrax. Two postal facilities in Florida are closed. The next day, two postal facilities in New Jersey will be closed.
October 21, 2001
Two postal workers in the Washington DC area die after inhaling anthrax.
October 25, 2001
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT Act) is passed 98-1 in the Senate
October 29, 2001
The Weekly Standard runs an article entitled "Why Iraq?" It alleges that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Europe and that Iraq is linked to the anthrax attacks in America (the latter because one expert thinks it is unlikely a terrorist group could develop anthrax on its own.) It hints at Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. And, for a kicker, "If all we do is contain Saddam's Iraq, it is a virtual certainty that Baghdad will soon have nuclear weapons."
November 8, 2001
The New York Times and Frontline report that an Iraqi defector, an army general, claims that the Iraqi military trained Arab fighters to hijack airplanes. Mother Jones later exposes the Iraqi general as bogus and linked to Ahmed Chalabi.
November 11, 2001
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, senior Al Qaeda official in charge of the network's training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, is captured in Pakistan. Newsweek will call him "America's first big trophy in the war on terror."
November 21, 2001
According to Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret."' Woodward adds that, immediately after Rumsfeld and [General Tommy] Franks work out a deal under which Franks can spend any money he needs. "And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible."
A 94-year-old woman becomes the fifth and final person to die after coming in contact with anthrax.
Late November, 2001
Osama bin Laden is pinned down at Tora Bora. The CIA asks the US military to supply additional troops to help capture him. The White House asks Pakistani President Musharraf to put Pakistani troops on the Afghan-Pakistan border to cut off bin Laden's escape routes. Neither request is fulfilled, and bin Laden escapes.
In a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, Dick Cheney lays out what will come to be known as the One Percent Doctrine. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." The quote is from Ron Suskind's 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine. "As to 'evidence,'" Suskind writes, "the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
December 1, 2001
Rumsfeld orders Franks to begin work on an Iraq war plan. Bush will meet with military leaders regarding the plan on a regular basis starting late December, despite public assurances that the administration is seeking a diplomatic solution to its showdown with Saddam.
December 2, 2001
Energy-trading giant Enron declares bankruptcy.
December 3, 2001
In an interview with Newsweek, Bush declares "Saddam is evil."
December 9, 2001
Appearing on Meet the Press, Dick Cheney describes to Tim Russert as "pretty well confirmed" reports that 9/11 plotter Mohammad Atta met with Al-Qaeda operatives in the Czech Republic in April.
He will continue to say this even after the FBI, CIA, and Czech intelligence back off the claim. The 9/11 Commission will debunk it thoroughly.
December 12, 2001
Tommy Franks tells Donald Rumsfeld that he has a plan for softening up Iraq. "I'm thinking in terms of spikes, Mr. Secretary," he writes in his book American Soldier. "Spurts of activity followed by periods of inactivity. We want the Iraqis to become accustomed to military expansion, and then apparent contraction." The Downing Street memos have proof that these spikes were used. In July 2002 British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon is quoted as saying that the US "had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This seem to contradict President Bush, who said, in Oct 2002, that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary."
December 20, 2001
New York Times reporter Judith Miller writes a front-page story for the paper titled "AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES." The source is a man delivered to Miller by Ahmed Chalabi. The man failed a CIA polygraph test before the article came out, and his claims were discredited by informed intelligence experts. The polygraph is not mentioned in Miller's story. "Government experts" call his information "reliable and significant."
December 28, 2001
According to Woodward's Plan of Attack, General Tommy Franks briefs Bush on the Pentagon's Iraq war planning at his Crawford ranch. Bush had directed the start of such planning five weeks earlier. Afterwards, Bush tells reporters they spoke about Afghanistan.