“…the State Department knew nothing of the new interrogation rules approved by [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and had no confirmation of mistreatment until news stories in March 2003 revealed that two Afghans had been beaten to death while in U.S. custody. Although the military had initially reported that the men had died of natural […]
Category: quotes
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
3/14/2003
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.; […]