In response to the November 17, 2002, Joint Task Force Guantanamo memo, which allowed interrogators to use enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees, Special Agent in Charge, Criminal Investigation Task Force, Guantanamo (CITF-G) Timothy James, wrote on December 17, 2002: “CITF-G objects to these aggressive interrogation techniques,’ and that ‘LEA [law enforcement] agents only use rapport-based […]
Category: quotes
12/15/2002
“The Joint Intelligence Committees said…in a report issued in December 2002: ‘…neither President [Bill] Clinton nor President Bush nor their National Security Councils put the government or the Intelligence Community on a war footing before September 11th.’ …before 9/11, bin Laden was, by our government’s definition, an international criminal, not an imminent national security threat. […]
12/15/2002
“In December [2002], as Saddam Hussein agreed to let the [weapons] inspectors in and said Iraq would fully comply with the [UN Security Council] resolution [1441], [President] Bush dispatched troops to the region, sending 25,000 that month and 62,000 more in early January.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
12/15/2002
According to the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, issued in December 2002, CIA Director George Tenet said: ” ‘In hindsight, I wish I had said, *Let’s take the whole [al Qaeda] enterprise down* and put five hundred more people there sooner.’ …’We never had enough officers from the Directorate of Operations,’ recalled one former chief […]
12/15/2002
“Last fall [2002], as the U.S. began planning the invasion of Iraq, Washington shifted many of its highly classified special-forces units and officers who had been hunting bin Laden in Afghanistan, moving them to Iraq, where they performed covert operations before the war began. By December [2002] many of the 800 special-forces personnel who had […]
12/15/2002
Excerpts from CIA Counterterrorist Center Director Cofer Black which appeared in the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, completed December 2002, said: “Despite several years of effort the CIA had been unable to recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda leadership. Black knew that the CIA was in trouble ‘without penetrations of [the] UBL […]
12/15/2002
Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix was interviewed by CNN war correspondent Christiane Amanpour on March 17, 2004. Describing the unsuccessful search for WMD, Blix said: “part of the problem was that he himself had believed the weapons probably existed. ‘I’m not here to have gut feelings,’ he said. ‘But yes, in December 2002 […]
12/15/2002
According to the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, completed December 2002: “CIA briefers sensed that [President] Bush’s national security cabinet viewed terrorism as the kind of phenomenon it had been during the 1980s: potent but limited, a theatrical sort of threat that could produce episodic public crises but did not jeopardize the fundamental security of […]
12/15/2002
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “811. … -In December 2002, the deployment of 3 Commando Brigade was identified as a way for the UK to make a valuable contribution in the initial stages of a land campaign if transit through Turkey was refused. The operational risks were not explicitly […]
12/15/2002
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said: “Ultimately, President Bush concluded that he had to remove Saddam’s regime from power by war. In my judgment, his moment of decision came in December 2002, when the Iraqi regime made its unsatisfactory WMD declaration to the United Nations. From that point forward, it seemed to me, […]