Director of Reconstruction in Iraq L. Paul Bremer issued Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 1 on May 16, 2003. It “provided for the ‘De-Ba’athification of Iraqi Society.’ All Ba’ath party members holding any position [of importance]…were removed from their jobs. With this Order, 120,000 of Iraq’s most experienced and highest ranking civil servants…were fired.” – […]
5/16/2003
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) leader L. Paul “Bremer’s first act of business in Iraq was to define his powers as administrator of the CPA with the enactment of Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1 on May 16, 2003. …Bremer altered Iraqi law in order to implement an economic model preferred by the Bush administration…to implement […]
5/16/2003
“By [Lieutenant General Jay] Garner’s calculation the U.S. now had at least 350,000 more enemies [in Iraq, on May 16, 2003] than it had the day before–the 50,000 Baathists, the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers from the army, and a handful from the now defunct Iraqi leadership group.” – Bob Woodward, State of Denial, Page 200 […]
5/15/2003
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “817. … -Following the resignation of Ms Clare Short, the [UK] International Development Secretary, and the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1483 in May 2003, DFID assumed leadership of the UK’s reconstruction effort in Iraq. DFID would subsequently define, within the framework established […]
5/15/2003
“Since May 2003, a new branch of al Qaeda–al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula–has been active within Saudi Arabia, seeking to undermine the regime through a concerted campaign of attacks on domestic as well as foreign targets.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History […]
5/15/2003
Historian Timothy Naftali wrote: “Unbeknownst to any of the principal actors in this drama, May 2003 was the height of the Bush counterterrorism offensive. Iraq was under U.S. occupation, and three-quarters of the pre-9/11 leadership of al Qaeda had been captured or killed.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
5/15/2003
Following the overthrow of Baghdad in April 2003, “the U.S. military did not secure the massive weapons caches that the Iraqi military had stashed around the country, estimated to amount to one million tons. …[Lieutenant General Ricardo] Sanchez recalls that by May 2003 ‘the Iraqis began holding open-air bazaars that sold everything from small handguns […]
5/15/2003
“During a May 2003 custodial interview with [former Iraqi Intelligence Service Deputy Director] Faruq Hijazi, he said in a 1994 meeting with bin Laden in the Sudan, bin Laden requested that Iraq assist al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured antiship limpet mines. Bin Laden thought that Iraq should be able […]
5/15/2003
On May 15, 2003, “the day before [Director of Reconstruction in Iraq L. Paul] Bremer signed the de-Baathification Order, [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith gave testimony in front of the House International Relations Committee on the conditions inside Iraq. He explicitly rejected the possibility of keeping senior Ba’athists in office as a price for maintaining […]
5/15/2003
Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul “Bremer would later write in his book My Year in Iraq that in May 2003 he sent [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld a copy of a draft report by the Rand Corporation, a military-affiliated think tank, that estimated that five hundred thousand troops were needed to stabilize […]