After President Bush’s January 30, 2001, National Security Council meeting, “Treasury Secretary [Paul] O’Neill was convinced that ‘getting Hussein was now the administration’s focus, that much was already clear.’ But O’Neill believed, the real destabilizing factor in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–the issue Bush had just turned his back […]
Category: quotes
1/30/2001
The first meeting of President Bush’s National Security Council took place on January 30, 2001. When the subject of regime change in Iraq was discussed, George “Tenet, the CIA director, unrolled oversized surveillance photographs on the table showing antiaircraft batteries around Baghdad and what he called chemical weapons factories. Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill […]
1/30/2001
“Seeing little reason, or intelligence justification, for war at the close of the inaugural National Security Council meeting [on January 30, 2001], Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was perplexed. ‘Who, exactly, was pushing this foreign policy?’ he wondered to himself. And ‘why Saddam, why now, and why [was] this central to U.S. interests?’ ” – James […]
1/30/2001
“It was little wonder that during his first National Security Council meeting [on January 30, 2001], when the only topics on the agenda were Israel and Iraq, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill thought that all the issues had already been decided. ‘The meeting had seemed scripted,’ he thought. …[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld had said little, […]
1/30/2001
Deputy Secretary of the Interior Stephen “Griles was a lead actor in the Cheney Energy Task Force [that first convened on January 30, 2001], serving as the Interior Department’s chief representative. As such, he played a lead role in mapping out the U.S. oil industry’s interests in Iraq’s oil fields and developing some of the […]
1/30/2001
“Among those who have revealed the early planning of the [Iraq] war are Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first treasury secretary and an official member of the Cheney Energy Task Force. According to O’Neill, regime change in Iraq was the number one item on the agenda at the very first Bush administration National Security Council meeting […]
1/30/2001
“We were told by the president [Bush] that the war [in Iraq] was his last choice. But it is now clear that it was always his first preference. His former secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, confirmed that Iraq was ‘topic A’ at the very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council just ten […]
1/30/2001
“On January 30 [2001], [future 9/11 hijacker] Ziad Samir Jarrah, a Lebanese national who had obtained a U.S. visa in Berlin [Germany], was stopped for questioning at Dubai Airport in the United Arab Emirates. The CIA reportedly requested that he be interrogated, but the Agency later denied that.” – Peter Lance, 1000 Years For Revenge, […]
1/30/2001
“U.S. and UAE [United Arab Emirates] officials say [9/11 hijacker Ziad] Jarrah was stopped at the airport in Dubai on January 30, 2001, after the CIA notified UAE officials that he would be arriving from Pakistan on his way back to Europe. UAE sources say the CIA wanted to know where he had been in […]
1/25/2001
Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote: “[counterterrorism czar] Dick Clarke sent…a [three-page] memorandum to me on January 25 [2001], laying out the case for stepped-up efforts against al-Qaeda. Ironically, only one paragraph, in an attachment to the memorandum, addressed al Qaeda and the homeland threat.” [Editor’s note: The Richard Clarke three-page memo to Condoleezza Rice mentioned al […]