“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
“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 […]
1/15/2004
In January 2004, “Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the ‘top member of Al Qaeda’ whose statements became the basis for the [Bush] administration’s assertions that Saddam’s regime provided biological and chemical weapons training to al Qaeda members, recants his earlier claims.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Frank Rich, The Greatest […]