3/16/2003

On March 16, 2003, President Bush said: ” ‘The dictator of Iraq [Saddam] and his weapons of mass destruction are a threat to the security of free nations.’ ”  – Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence, Page 340 […]

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3/16/2003

In an appearance on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney said the International Atomic Energy Agency, who had recently exposed the Niger documents as forgeries, had ” ‘consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. …We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear […]

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3/16/2003

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 […]

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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 […]

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3/15/2003

“…to date, the only arrest of an al Qaeda terrorist in the United States that the NSA [National Security Agency] warrantless eavesdropping program supposedly was involved in was that of Iyman Faris, a thirty-eight-year-old truck driver in Columbus, Ohio, who was caught in March 2003 planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City. […]

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3/15/2003

“Immediately after 9/11, a group calling itself Jund al-Islam (The Army of Islam) established itself in a mountainous area near the town of Halabja [in Iraqi Kurdistan]. It was clear that the group was linked to al-Qaeda. The group subsequently merged with another extremist Islamist party to form Ansar al-Islam (The Partisans of Islam). In […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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