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 […]
Category: quotes
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 […]
3/14/2003
Deputy Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel John “Yoo’s March [14] 2003 opinion…declared that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other crimes did not apply to the military interrogators in Guantanamo. …Among the practices the memo discussed as arguably legal were gouging a prisoner’s eyes out, dousing him with ‘scalding water, corrosive acid, or […]
3/14/2003
“On April 1, 2008, nearly four years after The Washington Post first revealed the existence of the Torture Memo, the Pentagon released a March [14] 2003 memo that went further than the original 2002 memo in arguing that the wartime powers of the executive as commander in chief of the armed forces are not subject […]
3/14/2003
“On March 14 [2003], Senator Jay Rockefeller IV [D-WV], the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to FBI chief Robert Mueller asking for an investigation because ‘the fabrication of these [Niger yellowcake] documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.’ […]
3/14/2003
On March 14, 2003, “[Counterterrorism Adviser Rand] Beers quietly tendered his resignation, something almost unheard-of for a senior member of the National Security Council staff in a time of war. Beers recalls his thinking at the time: ‘We were taking our eye off bin Laden and we were going to pay for it, both with respect to […]
3/14/2003
On March 14, 2003, Deputy Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo sent a memo to General Counsel William Haynes titled, ‘Military Interrogations of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside of the United States.’ It “states that the Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not hold for alien enemy combatants held outside of the U.S.; […]