Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul “Wolfowitz would later acknowledge [in the May 2003 issue of Vanity Fair] that Iraq’s supposed supply of WMD had never been the most compelling case for war: ‘For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’ ” […]
5/15/2003
In May 2003, “the Iranians approached the United States…offering to turn over top al Qaeda lieutenants, including both Saif al-Adel, al Qaeda’s chief of operations, and Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son. …the Iranians wanted a trade; in return for the al Qaeda leaders, Tehran wanted the Americans to hand over members of the […]
5/15/2003
“…since May 2003, when al Qaeda first launched a wave of terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia, the Saudi security forces have become far more cooperative with the CIA and FBI in cracking down on al Qaeda networks operating on Saudi soil. After the Riyadh bombings in that month, CIA Director George Tenet traveled to Saudi […]
5/15/2003
“In May 2003, the Bush administration launched the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an independent body with analysts from more than a dozen agencies, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service. That Center is supposed to share all potentially useful intelligence and collate […]
5/15/2003
On May 15, 2003, Lieutenant General Jay Garner received a draft order from his replacement to run post-war Iraq, Jerry Bremer, “disbanding the Iraqi ministries of Defense and Interior, the entire Iraqi military, and all of Saddam’s body-guard and special paramilitary organizations. Garner was stunned. The de-Baathification order was dumb, but this was a disaster. […]
5/15/2003
In May 2003, “Vanity Fair magazine questioned Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz about the reason for attacking Iraq. He said that ‘for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue–weapons of mass destruction–because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
5/15/2003
“After learning of the problem [an unguarded weapons dump in Baghdad] in May 2003, an internal IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] memorandum was written alerting Washington that terrorists might be in the process of helping ‘themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history.’ The White House, however, ignored the warning. Thus, intent on finding the […]
5/15/2003
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan wrote: “As [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz would tell Vanity Fair in May 2003, [President] Bush and his national security team ‘settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on [for invading Iraq] which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.’ Wolfowitz went on […]
5/15/2003
“In May 2003, President Bush signed an executive order that provides oil industry companies–and only oil companies–unprecedented immunity against contractual disputes or lawsuits resulting from discrimination, labor law abuses, environmental disasters, and human rights violations. [As reported in the August 8, 2003, edition of The San Francisco Chronicle] ‘In terms of legal liability,’ says Tom […]
5/14/2003
“In the spring of [May 14] 2003, [Central Command leader] General [Tommy] Franks was named in a lawsuit brought before a Belgian court for his role in the Iraq war. The Belgian parliament had passed a law in the 1990s giving their nation’s courts the jurisdiction to try war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against […]