“In his State of the Union address [on January 20, 2004], the president [Bush] again downgrades his rhetoric on WMDs in the wake of [Iraq Survey Group leader] David Kay’s failure to find Saddam’s stockpiles: …’Had we failed to act, the dictator’s [Saddam’s] weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. Had we […]
Category: quotes
1/19/2004
Vice President Dick “Cheney said he’s effective working behind the scenes and doesn’t believe voters will choose the next president based on running mates. ‘Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?’ he said. ‘It’s a nice way to operate, actually.’ ” – Judy Keen, “Cheney […]
1/19/2004
“Vice President [Dick] Cheney says he believes ‘the jury’s still out’ on whether Iraq had the chemical and biological weapons that were the Bush administration’s justification for war. ‘I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence,’ Cheney said in an interview with USA […]
1/16/2004
“In spring 2002, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] demanded that it be given access to prisoners under rendition. Instead, CIA lawyers further twisted legal boundaries by establishing a new category of prisoner: Persons Under Control, or PUC. Anyone held as PUC was automatically denied access to the ICRC, and even his existence […]
1/15/2004
“A report published in January 2004 by the U.S. Army War College strongly criticized the Bush administration for its ‘war on terrorism’ as being ‘unfocused,’ pointing out that the war in Iraq was ‘unnecessary’ and a ‘detour’ that had diverted attention and resources away from the real threat posed by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.” […]
1/15/2004
“In all, the nineteen hijackers entered the United States a total of thirty-three times, through more than ten different airports, without ever being stopped or detained. ‘The innovation Al Qaeda introduced is *clean operatives,* ‘ said Doris Meissner, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner up until 2000, ‘who can go through immigration controls undetected.’ That […]
1/15/2004
Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s ‘Letter to Bin Laden and Zawahiri’ was intercepted by Iraqi Kurds in January 2004. It said: “After study and reflection, we can classify our enemy into four groups: The Americans[:] As you know, they are the most cowardly of men. They are an easy prey. …We ask […]
1/15/2004
“German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Oct. 5, 2005, that the Bush administration had admitted to her that it had mistakenly abducted a German citizen, Khaled Masri, from Macedonia in January 2004. Masri reportedly was flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he allegedly was abused while being interrogated. He was released in May […]
1/15/2004
In the January-February 2004 issue of Mother Jones, State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann said: ” ‘The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S. And the [Bush] administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both.’ “ [The […]
1/15/2004
“A [January] 2004 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also detected a politically driven shift in intelligence assessments in 2002. It discovered a yawning gap between what was claimed and what was known, especially the ‘alliance’ between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The endowment reported: ‘There was and is no solid evidence […]