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 […]
Category: quotes
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 […]
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 […]