On May 16, 2003, “another series of al Qaeda-linked bombings erupted in Casablanca, Morocco, with a death toll of forty-one.” – Peter Lance, 1000 Years For Revenge, Page 443 […]
Category: quotes
5/16/2003
On May 16, 2003, “the New York Times reported that…[9/11 mastermind] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had confessed to interrogators that ‘landmarks in New York and Washington, previously selected by Mr. bin Laden, remain on al Qaeda’s target list.’ Included on that list was the Sears Tower in Chicago…” – Peter Lance, 1000 Years For Revenge, Page […]
5/16/2003
“On May 16 [2003], a week after [Coalition Provisional Authority leader L. Paul] Bremer arrived [in Iraq], he signed Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 1, which was designed to extinguish the Baath Party and Baathists from Iraqi government and society. …Excising Baathists hollowed out the entire Iraqi civil service and professional control over the ministries. […]
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 […]
5/15/2003
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul “Wolfowitz would later acknowledge [in the May 2003 issue of Vanity Fair] that Iraq’s supposed supply of WMD had never been the most compelling case for war: ‘For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’ ” […]
5/15/2003
Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul “Bremer would later write in his book My Year in Iraq that in May 2003 he sent [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld a copy of a draft report by the Rand Corporation, a military-affiliated think tank, that estimated that five hundred thousand troops were needed to stabilize […]
5/15/2003
On May 15, 2003, “the day before [Director of Reconstruction in Iraq L. Paul] Bremer signed the de-Baathification Order, [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith gave testimony in front of the House International Relations Committee on the conditions inside Iraq. He explicitly rejected the possibility of keeping senior Ba’athists in office as a price for maintaining […]
5/15/2003
“During a May 2003 custodial interview with [former Iraqi Intelligence Service Deputy Director] Faruq Hijazi, he said in a 1994 meeting with bin Laden in the Sudan, bin Laden requested that Iraq assist al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured antiship limpet mines. Bin Laden thought that Iraq should be able […]
5/15/2003
Following the overthrow of Baghdad in April 2003, “the U.S. military did not secure the massive weapons caches that the Iraqi military had stashed around the country, estimated to amount to one million tons. …[Lieutenant General Ricardo] Sanchez recalls that by May 2003 ‘the Iraqis began holding open-air bazaars that sold everything from small handguns […]