“In December 2002, when the bulk of the troop deployment [in Iraq] was just beginning, the president [Bush] had rejected [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s argument that Iraq’s failure to accurately declare its weapons programs was reason enough to call off the inspections and set a firm invasion date. The force was not yet ready.” [The […]
Category: quotes
12/15/2002
“The Bush administration was mapping out its postinvasion plans for Iraq’s oil in late 2002. One forum was the U.S. State Department’s Future of Iraq Project’s Oil and Energy Working Group, composed of administration officials, expatriate Iraqis, and others. Meeting four times between December 2002 and April 2003, the members of the working group agreed […]
12/15/2002
According to the December 2002 Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “The Joint Inquiry confirmed that, before September 11, the Intelligence Community produced at least twelve reports over a seven-year period suggesting that […]
12/15/2002
“In December 2002 the CIA was asked to write an official evaluation of Iraq’s ‘Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Disclosure’ of its weapons programs–a 12,000-page document delivered to the UN inspectors as required by the Security Council’s Resolution 1441, which sent inspectors back into Iraq and started the countdown to war…Vice President Dick Cheney argued […]
12/15/2002
Then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote: “In December 2002, after [chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix and UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission] entered Iraq, we had intelligence (and this remains valid) of Saddam calling his key people working on weapons together and telling them anyone who cooperated with interviews outside of Iraq […]
12/15/2002
“Senators Joe Biden [D-DE] and Chuck Hagel [R-NE] were in the [Middle East] region on a fact-finding mission and, along with the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait, briefly attended the classified war game [called Internal Look, held by Central Command during December 2002]. …Biden had a concern on his mind: the biggest worry in Washington beyond […]
12/15/2002
“In 2004, the ISG [Iraq Survey Group] uncovered evidence of a meeting of over four hundred scientists chaired by Taha Ramadan, the vice president of Iraq, just before the [UN weapons] inspectors returned [in December 2002], in which he warned them of dire consequences if the inspectors found anything that interfered with the lifting of […]
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 […]