In August 2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “created an inter-agency group of people from State, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House who were charged with coordinating the government’s preparations leading up to the invasion [of Iraq], including securing bases in the region and getting overflight permission from other countries. The body […]
Category: quotes
8/15/2002
Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft wrote an op-ed for the August 15, 2002, Wall Street Journal titled ‘Don’t Attack Saddam.’ ” ‘There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations,’ he wrote, ‘and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks.’ To attack Iraq, while ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said, ‘could turn the […]
8/15/2002
In August 2002, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas “Feith put together the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon. A larger, more powerful successor to the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group that Feith ran with [neoconservative scholar] David Wurmser and [Defense Department official] Michael Maloof, the OSP’s mission was to ferret out evidence that […]
8/15/2002
In his August 15, 2002, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam,’ former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft “wrote that ‘scant evidence’ connects Saddam Hussein to terrorism and that Saddam was ‘unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by handing such weapons to terrorists who […]
8/15/2002
“Intelligence developed by NSA [National Security Agency] revealed that in August 2002 a French company called CIS Paris helped broker the sale to Iraq of twenty tons of a Chinese-made chemical called HTPB, which was used to make solid fuel for ballistic missiles.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
8/15/2002
“Under the headline ‘Don’t Attack Saddam,’ [former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft’s] August 15 [2002] column [in The Wall Street Journal] stated…an invasion [of Iraq] would require that the United states pursue a ‘go it alone’ strategy, and would ‘result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, […]
8/15/2002
The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) “was convened in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included [political advisor to President Bush Karl] Rove, [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice, the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin–and…[Vice presidential Chief of Staff Scooter] […]
8/15/2002
“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 […]
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 […]