In testimony before the 9/11 Commission on July 9, 2003, “A commission member, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, raised the Iraq-al Qaeda issue with Judith Yaphe, a veteran CIA Iraq expert. Yaphe spoke of the ‘unwillingness of Saddam and Osama to consider cooperation’ and testified that while the Iraqi regime used Islamic extremists, […]
Category: quotes
7/9/2003
“A former director of the strategic, proliferation and military affairs office in the U.S. Department of State, Greg Thielmann, said in July [9] 2003 that ‘this [Bush] administration…has had a faith-based intelligence attitude [in] its top-down use of intelligence: we know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.’ “ – Hans Blix, […]
7/9/2003
Director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment Joseph Cirincione wrote, on July 9, 2003: ” ‘In the light of the past three months of fruitless searches by U.S., British, and Australian experts, the UNMOVIC [UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] inspection process in Iraq now looks much better than critics at the time […]
7/8/2003
“In its first report, issued July 8, 2003, [9/11] commission staffers complained that their work was being hampered by the failure of the executive branch (particularly the Pentagon and the Justice Department) to quickly respond in the production of documents and testimony.” – Peter Lance, 1000 Years For Revenge, Page 4 […]
7/8/2003
On July 8, 2003, vice presidential Chief of Staff Scooter “Libby had another get-together with [reporter] Judy Miller. …Once again, [Vice President Dick] Cheney had given his chief of staff the green light to disclose information from the classified National Intelligence Estimate [NIE]. …[Cheney’s chief counsel] had reassured Libby that if [President] Bush had authorized […]
7/8/2003
On July 8, 2003, Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times interviewed Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “Armitage revealed a tantalizing morsel that was in the classified INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] memo: that [Envoy to Niger and former Ambassador Joe] Wilson’s wife [Valerie Plame] worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction […]
7/8/2003
“The White House resistance [to the 9/11 Commission] became so acute that Commission investigators were denied access to the full declassified 800-plus-page report of the Joint Inquiry until late spring [2003], leading Sen. John McCain [R-AZ], one of the original sponsors of the Commission, to declare [in the Wall Street Journal on July 8, 2003], […]
7/7/2003
On July 7, 2003, White House Press Secretary Ari “Fleischer inadvertently dropped a small bombshell: ‘Now, we’ve long acknowledged–and this is old news, we’ve said this repeatedly – that the information on yellowcake [uranium, being sold by Niger to Iraq] did, indeed, turn out to be incorrect.’ ” – Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the […]
7/7/2003
On July 7, 2003, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer “called reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post and engaged in a rare act: he admitted a White House mistake. ‘White House Backs Off Claim on Iraqi Buy,’ read the headline…in the Post the next morning. ‘Knowing all that we know now,’ a senior […]
7/7/2003
In a press briefing on July 7, 2003, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claimed “that neither [Vice President Dick] Cheney nor anyone else in the White House had had any reason to suspect the Niger charge [of selling yellowcake uranium to Iraq] prior to the [January 28, 2003] State of the Union speech. But under persistent […]