“On April 16 [2003], [Central Command leader General Tommy] Franks cheerfully announced that most U.S. combat forces in Iraq would be withdrawn within sixty days so that they would not ‘wear out their welcome.’ Franks’s plan called for keeping some thirty thousand U.S. troops there as a peacetime occupation force. As a result, two army […]
Category: quotes
4/16/2003
“On April 16, 2003, [Commander of Coalition Forces] GEN Tommy Franks issued orders to withdraw American warfighting units from Iraq within sixty days, and use incoming forces for only up to 120 days.” – Ricardo S. Sanchez with Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle, Page 168 […]
4/16/2003
On April 16, 2003, Commander of Coalition Forces General Tommy Franks distributed a ‘Freedom Message to the Iraqi People.’ It read: ” ‘Coalition Forces in Iraq have come as liberators, not as conquerors. We have come to eliminate an oppressive and aggressive regime that refused to comply with UN Security Council resolutions requiring the destruction […]
4/15/2003
“Larry Johnson, a registered Republican and former CIA official who voted for and contributed to Bush’s 2000 campaign for the presidency and thereafter became the deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism, said that in ‘April of last year [2003], I was beginning to pick up grumblings from friends inside the intelligence […]
4/15/2003
Deputy Secretary of Defense “Paul Wolfowitz had initially suggested that much of the long-neglected repair and upgrading of Iraq’s infrastructure would be paid for by its oil proceeds; [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Aide Lawrence] Di Rita stressed this with more passion [following his mid-April 2003 arrival in Kuwait to join Jay Garner’s Office for […]
4/15/2003
“Executives of ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP each took a turn guiding Iraq’s oil industry. Philip Carroll of Shell and Gary Vogler, a former ExxonMobil executive, were the first on the ground. They arrived in April 2003, just one month after the invasion. Officially, the two were the ranking U.S. advisers to the Iraqi […]
4/15/2003
“Only in the footnotes of the [9/11] commission’s final report was it made clear that [senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission Dietrich] Snell’s entire authority for moving the origin of the 9/11 plot two years forward was the word of [9/11 mastermind] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [KSM] himself, who had been tortured after his capture on […]
4/15/2003
“Saddam even had a history of financing Islamist terrorists with links to bin Laden. Secret documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center in Baghdad in April 2003 prove that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the mid-1990s. The […]
4/15/2003
“The Spanish contingent sent to Iraq after the 2003 invasion [in April 2003] was around thirteen hundred troops–only about 1 percent of the entire occupation force but the largest contingent from Western Europe after Britain and Italy.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Deepak Tripathi, Overcoming the Bush Legacy […]
4/15/2003
In Iraq, on April 15, 2003, “the American authorities had helped organize a conference of more than seventy Iraqi notables–exile leaders, tribal sheiks, Kurds and Shiite clerics–in a tent at Tallil Air Base, near Nasiriya, to begin the process of creating a new Iraqi government. …After a daylong session, the group issued a statement outlining […]