” ‘I haven’t made up my mind we’re going to war with Iraq,’ he [President Bush] said at an October [1, 2002] press conference. ‘I’ve made up my mind we need to disarm the man [Saddam Hussein]. …There needs to be a strong new [United Nations] resolution in order for us to make it clear […]
Category: quotes
10/1/2002
The CIA’s classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, delivered to Congress on October 1, 2002, “offered bold and definitive conclusions in its ‘key judgments’: Iraq, it said, ‘has chemical and biological weapons’ and ‘is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.’ …Deeper in the NIE, there was information that undercut those stark […]
10/1/2002
“The NIE [National Intelligence Estimate, released on October 1, 2002] stated with ‘high confidence’ that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program since the U.N. weapons inspectors had left Iraq in 1998, adding that Iraq ‘probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.’ According to former NSA [National Security Agency] and CIA analysts, NSA […]
10/1/2002
In analyzing the NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) completed on October 1, 2002, then-CIA Director George Tenet said: “An NIE had never been relied upon as a basis for going to war, and, in my view, the decision to invade Iraq was not solely predicated on this one. But if we had done a better job […]
10/1/2002
“The most contentious of the NSA [National Security Agency] SIGINT [signals intelligence] material used in the [October 1, 2002] NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] alleged that the Iraqis were developing unmanned drones for the purpose of delivering chemical or biological weapons to targets in the United States. This claim was largely based on an inferential reading […]
10/1/2002
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is a division of the State Department that has clearance to view intelligence gathered by all other agencies. “At the end of the Key Judgments section of the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate of October 1, 2002], a textbox was included, with the title ‘State/INR Alternative View.’ ‘In INR’s […]
10/1/2002
“On October 1 [2002], Baghdad agreed that [UN weapons] inspectors could return [to Iraq], and the UN weapons team agreed to await further instructions from the Security Council before taking up its chores.” – Todd S. Purdum and The New York Times Staff, A Time of Our Choosing, Pages 59-60 […]
10/1/2002
In the National Intelligence Estimate of October 1, 2002, in a textbox titled ‘State Department/INR Alternative View of Iraq’s Nuclear program,’ the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) declared: ” ‘The activities we have detected [in Iraq] do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider […]
10/1/2002
According to the Silberman-Robb Commission’s report, which was released on March 31, 2005: ” ‘The October [1] 2002 NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] reflected the shift from the late-1990s assessments that Iraq could have biological weapons [BW] to the definitive conclusion that Iraq ‘has’ biological weapons, and that its BW program was larger and more advanced […]
10/1/2002
“[W]hen the Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate of October 1, 2002] in light of evidence that became available after the war, it came to the conclusion that the collective wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community, as represented in the estimate, had been stunningly wrong. ‘Most of the major key judgments [in […]