On March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press. ” ‘I think [director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)] Mr. [Mohammed] ElBaradei is wrong,’ Cheney said, accusing the IAEA of having ‘consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing.’ ” – Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever […]
Category: quotes
3/16/2003
Regarding Vice President Dick Cheney’s comment on March 16, 2003, on Meet the Press, that Saddam ‘has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons,’ then-chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix wrote: “His declaration was as firm as it was unfounded.” – Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, Page 8 […]
3/16/2003
In an appearance on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney said: ” ‘I think [director of the International Atomic Energy Agency] Mr. [Mohamed] ElBaradei frankly is wrong [in claiming Iraq has not reconstituted a nuclear weapons program]. …And I think if you look at the track record of the International […]
3/16/2003
Speaking on his son’s television network on March 16, 2003: “Saddam said that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction in the past but declared that it no longer had any.” – Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq, Page 251 […]
3/15/2003
Then-chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix wrote: “…in March 2003 the policy of containment was abandoned in the case of Iraq and the policy of counter-proliferation was applied: a combined UN and IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection force of fewer than 200 inspectors costing perhaps $80 million per year was pushed out and replaced […]
3/15/2003
Regarding enhanced interrogation techniques: “Acutely aware that the agency would be blamed if the policies lost political support, nervous C.I.A. officials began to curb its practices much earlier than most Americans know: no one was waterboarded after March 2003, and coercive interrogation methods were shelved altogether in 2005.” [The 15th of the month used for […]
3/15/2003
“But while U.S. intelligence was busy worrying about the ring plan [that Iraqi forces would use to defend Baghdad], Saddam’s Republican Guard, and his unconventional weapons, it dismissed as minor the role of the Fedayeen [paramilitary fighters] and entirely missed the fact that tons of arms caches were distributed in March [2003] and stored in […]
3/15/2003
A 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum “says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Scott Shane, “Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects,” The New York […]
3/15/2003
Then-CIA Director George Tenet made a comment to President Bush regarding the possibility of a link between Iraq and al-Qa’ida: ” ‘Mr. President,’ I said one morning in March 2003, ‘the vice president [Dick Cheney] wants to make a speech about Iraq and al-Qa’ida that goes way beyond what the intelligence shows. We [CIA] cannot […]
3/15/2003
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “21. In mid-March, Mr Blair’s determination to stand alongside the US left the UK with a stark choice. It could act with the US but without the support of the majority of the Security Council in taking military action if Saddam Hussein did not accept the US […]