“Until he retired in October 2002, Gregory Thielmann was in charge of military assessments within the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He said the makeup of the intelligence unit [the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, headed by neoconservative scholar David Wurmser] was a giveaway, indicating that they had no interest in true analysis. Like […]
Category: quotes
10/15/2002
“The Joint Staff effectively stated that view [that a prospective invasion of Iraq was no longer a matter of debate] in the form of a Strategic Guidance for Combatant Commanders. In mid-October [2002] a draft of this guidance was sent out to planning officers on the staffs of the senior U.S. military commanders around the […]
10/15/2002
“In October 2002, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press took a survey and found that 66 percent of Americans said they believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, despite the lack of proof. …79 percent believed that Iraq currently possessed–or was close to possessing–nuclear weapons. Three months later, a Knight-Ridder […]
10/15/2002
“In a classified three-page memo dated October 15, 2002, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld listed 29 things that could go wrong in an Iraq war. He reviewed it with the president [Bush] and the NSC [National Security Council]. …item Number 13 said, ‘U.S. could fail to find WMD on the ground.’ ” – Bob Woodward, […]
10/15/2002
“A sheaf of fabricated documents arrived from Italy to muddy the waters in October 2002 and the President [Bush] included the yellowcake story in his State of the Union address in January [2003]–the soon-to-be-exploded sixteen words that ‘the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…’ Eventually the […]
10/15/2002
“As [al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-] Zawahiri explained to a television audience in October 2002, five months before the American and British invasion of Iraq, such an invasion world ‘confirm Israel’s uncontested monopoly over weapons of mass destruction in the region, so as to ensure the submission of Arab and Islamic states to its wishes […]
10/14/2002
“The vision laid out in the [President] Bush document [the National Security Strategy of the United States, written on September 17, 2002, which said we must prevent other nations from ‘surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States’] is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the […]
10/14/2002
A member of the press inquired of President George W. Bush if there would be a change in the policy on Iraq since al Qaeda had reconstituted itself: “Yes. Well, first, I — we’re making great progress in the war against terror. But as I told our citizens, and have been repeatedly telling our citizens, this […]
10/14/2002
Speaking at the Thaddeus McCotter for Congress Dinner, President George W. Bush stated: “Military option is my last choice. It’s not my — it’s the last thing I want to do, is commit our military. My first choice is for Saddam Hussein to do what he said he would do, and after 11 years, disarm. I […]
10/13/2002
An article in The San Jose Mercury News on October 13, 2002, written by former U.S. ambassador Joe Wilson “argued that [President] Bush was being confrontational, wrapping his obvious smash-Saddam desires within a thin argument on WMDs, and that the United Nations was not taking a hard enough line on a dictator who had flouted […]