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 […]
Category: quotes
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, […]
12/14/2002
On December 14, 2002, “A week after the Iraqis made their submission [of a comprehensive written declaration of their WMD program], U.S. intelligence experts revealed that they had reached the preliminary conclusion that the Iraqi declaration had failed to account for chemical and biological agents missing when the inspectors left Iraq four years previously, and […]
12/13/2002
“On December 13 [2002], in a seven-minute public announcement, President Bush said that U.S. Military personnel and other essential civilians in high-risk areas of the world would receive a smallpox vaccine. As commander in chief he too would get the vaccine. ‘The vaccinations are a precaution only and not a response to any information concerning […]
12/13/2002
From the State Department’s December 13, 2002, publication titled ‘Iraq: From Fear to Freedom:’ “During 2001 and 2002, Baghdad has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes that most intelligence experts believe are intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.” – U.S. Department of State, “Iraq: From Fear to Freedom; WMD: The […]
12/13/2002
Regarding war in Iraq, “some in the [Bush] administration, according to a report drafted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment [on December 13, 2002], even argued that all the postwar costs, ‘the cost of the occupation, the cost for the military administration and providing for a provisional administration, all of that would come […]
12/12/2002
“The CIA reported in December 2002 that Ansar [al Islam] extremists had obtained VX nerve gas from the Iraqi regime. The report was first disclosed by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post on December 12 [2002]: ‘The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a […]