“At a meeting in August 2002 of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] on the proposed war in Iraq, Douglas J. Feith, the Pentagon’s under secretary of Defense for Policy, showed up at the meeting (which several DIA analysts said was very unusual) and proceeded to criticize the CIA’s failure to turn up any link […]
Category: quotes
8/15/2002
“Daniel Coleman, the FBI special agent whose knowledge of al-Qaeda was unrivaled, says that in August 2002 someone called him from [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s office…and asked him ‘to review everything’ on Iraq and the al-Qaeda connection. Coleman recalls: ‘We had already reviewed the material twice. Again we came up empty.’ Coleman…subsequently told the staffer […]
8/15/2002
Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Advisor, wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal which was published on August 15, 2002. It read: ” ‘There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks. Indeed, Saddam’s goals have little in common with the […]
8/15/2002
“Between October and December 2001, [Defense Department official Mike] Maloof and [neoconservative scholar David] Wurmser, who called themselves ‘Team B,’ combed through a decade of CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) files looking to find hitherto-overlooked connections, particularly between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. …Once they had completed their analysis, Maloof and Wurmser presented their findings […]
8/15/2002
“When Jalal Talabani and other Iraqi opposition leaders had gone to Washington to confer with [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and [Vice President Dick] Cheney in August 2002, he had warned about the potential for looting. There were many poor people in Baghdad, he cautioned, and they were likely to take the law into their […]
8/15/2002
“C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported. The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal […]
8/15/2002
Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen “Hadley and [vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis ‘Scooter’] Libby were part of another secret office that had been set up within the White House. Known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), it was established in August 2002 by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr., at the […]
8/15/2002
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, in August 2002: ” ‘If you’re asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are. It’s a fact, yes.’ “ [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Andrew Wander and Gregg Carlstrom, “Files Chart al-Qaeda’s Rise in Iraq,” Al Jazeera, Oct. […]
8/15/2002
Bush I National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft wrote an article on August 15, 2002, for The Wall Street Journal titled, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam.’ ” ‘We will all be better off when he is gone,’ the retired general and Bush family confidant began. …There was ‘scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less […]
8/15/2002
Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote: “Before leaving for Crawford [Texas], I took advantage of an interview with the BBC [on August 15, 2002] to say that there was a moral case and a national security argument for overthrowing Saddam. ‘We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing,’ I said. That was taken […]