As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 1 (de-Ba’athification of Iraq Society).” – Commissioned by the Prime Minister The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary,” IraqInquiry.org.uk, May 16, 2003 […]
Category: quotes
5/16/2003
“One of [Paul] Bremer’s first acts, on May 16 [2003], was to disband the Iraqi army and the Iraqi Defense Ministry. He also dissolved the police force, removed members of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party from government posts, and dismissed many teachers and other civil servants who had connections with the Ba’athists.” – Andrew Langley, Bush, Blair, […]
5/16/2003
“By [Lieutenant General Jay] Garner’s calculation the U.S. now had at least 350,000 more enemies [in Iraq, on May 16, 2003] than it had the day before–the 50,000 Baathists, the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers from the army, and a handful from the now defunct Iraqi leadership group.” – Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Page 200 […]
5/15/2003
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote: “As [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz would tell Vanity Fair in May 2003, [President] Bush and his national security team ‘settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on [for invading Iraq] which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.’ Wolfowitz went on […]
5/15/2003
“After learning of the problem [an unguarded weapons dump in Baghdad] in May 2003, an internal IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] memorandum was written alerting Washington that terrorists might be in the process of helping ‘themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history.’ The White House, however, ignored the warning. Thus, intent on finding the […]
5/15/2003
In May 2003, “Vanity Fair magazine questioned Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz about the reason for attacking Iraq. He said that ‘for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue–weapons of mass destruction–because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
5/15/2003
On May 15, 2003, Lieutenant General Jay Garner received a draft order from his replacement to run post-war Iraq, Jerry Bremer, “disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s body-guard and special paramilitary organizations. Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster. […]
5/15/2003
“In May 2003, the Bush administration launched the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an independent body with analysts from more than a dozen agencies, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service. That Center is supposed to share all potentially useful intelligence and collate […]
5/15/2003
“…since May 2003, when al Qaeda first launched a wave of terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia, the Saudi security forces have become far more cooperative with the CIA and FBI in cracking down on al Qaeda networks operating on Saudi soil. After the Riyadh bombings in that month, CIA Director George Tenet traveled to Saudi […]
5/15/2003
In May 2003, “the Iranians approached the United States…offering to turn over top al Qaeda lieutenants, including both Saif al-Adel, al Qaeda’s chief of operations, and Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son. …the Iranians wanted a trade; in return for the al Qaeda leaders, Tehran wanted the Americans to hand over members of the […]