” ‘Al Qaeda is here in the Kingdom, [CIA director George] Tenet told Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia [following terrorist attacks that targeted Americans in early May 2003]. They will kill you. They are using your country as a launching ground for attacks on the United States. If that happens, it is all over […]
5/5/2003
“They [the FBI] were slow to allocate resources to study and combat Sunni Islamic radicalism in general. They saw Shiite Iran as the primary fountainhead of religiously motivated terrorism. ‘Did we screw up, in retrospect?’ asked [President] Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, years later [in a May 5, 2003 interview], speaking of this broad […]
5/3/2003
President George W. Bush in reply to a question on the possibility of not fading WMDs in Iraq: “Yes — the question is about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The United States — United Nations Security Council voted 1441, which made the declaration it had weapons of mass destruction. It’s well-known […]
5/3/2003
On May 3, 2003, President Bush said, regarding WMD: ” ‘We’ll find them. And it’s just going to be a matter of time.’ ” – Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris, Page 222 […]
5/2/2003
President George W. Bush addressing the future of the War in Iraq: “As a result of the bravery and skill of our Armed Forces and coalition forces, the war on terror is much longer down the road because of what happened in Iraq. You see, the al Qaeda no longer have a ally in the regime in […]
5/2/2003
On May 2, 2003, the day after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: ” ‘[I]t would be a terrible mistake to think that Iraq is a fully secure, fully pacified environment. It is not. It is dangerous. There are people who are rolling hand […]
5/2/2003
Following the March 19, 2003, invasion of Iraq, “The old [Ba’ath] regime began to fall, and by 2 May 2003, seventeen of its fifty-five ‘most wanted’ had been arrested. (These ‘most wanted’ were famously represented as a pack of playing cards by the US, which many Iraqis felt insultingly trivialized a war that had claimed […]
5/2/2003
“…the Iraq reporting cell within NSA’s [National Security Agency’s] National Security Operations Center (NSOC) was disbanded on May 2 [2003], the day after President Bush declared ‘Mission Accomplished’ on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. NSA’s SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection assets that had formerly been committed to Iraq were shifted to intercepting […]
5/2/2003
A “comprehensive proposal, which diplomats referred to as ‘the grand bargain,’ was sent to Washington on May 2, 2003, just before a meeting in Geneva [Switzerland] between Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, and Zalmay Khalilzad, then a senior director at the National Security Council [NSC]. According to a report by Gareth Porter in the American […]
5/1/2003
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “President Bush declares [Iraq] ‘Mission Accomplished’.” – Commissioned by the Prime Minister The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary,” IraqInquiry.org.uk, May 1, 2003 […]