On April 16, 2003, Commander of Coalition Forces General Tommy Franks distributed a ‘Freedom Message to the Iraqi People.’ It read: ” ‘Coalition Forces in Iraq have come as liberators, not as conquerors. We have come to eliminate an oppressive and aggressive regime that refused to comply with UN Security Council resolutions requiring the destruction […]
4/16/2003
“On April 16, 2003, [Commander of Coalition Forces] GEN Tommy Franks issued orders to withdraw American warfighting units from Iraq within sixty days, and use incoming forces for only up to 120 days.” – Ricardo S. Sanchez with Donald T. Phillips, Wiser in Battle, Page 168 […]
4/16/2003
“On April 16 [2003], [Central Command leader General Tommy] Franks cheerfully announced that most U.S. combat forces in Iraq would be withdrawn within sixty days so that they would not ‘wear out their welcome.’ Franks’s plan called for keeping some thirty thousand U.S. troops there as a peacetime occupation force. As a result, two army […]
4/15/2003
President George W. Bush during a speaking event with small business owners in the Rose Garden: “This government is acting to protect the American people from the threats of a new era. In Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein is no more. (Applause.) A month ago — one month ago — that country was a prison […]
4/15/2003
“As it happened, most of what the media had reported about the museum looting [after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003]…turned out to be false. …Though press reports commonly reported 170,000 items stolen, [Marine Colonel Matthew] Bogdanos discovered that only a tiny fraction of that was actually looted. Somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 items […]
4/15/2003
“The economic cost of the looting [in Iraq, following the overthrow of Saddam in April 2003] was estimated at $12 billion, not including the future costs in delayed reconstruction, and the political price of having Iraqis equate freedom with disorder and violence.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Larry […]
4/15/2003
In Iraq, on April 15, 2003, “the American authorities had helped organize a conference of more than seventy Iraqi notables–exile leaders, tribal sheiks, Kurds and Shiite clerics–in a tent at Tallil Air Base, near Nasiriya, to begin the process of creating a new Iraqi government. …After a daylong session, the group issued a statement outlining […]
4/15/2003
“The Spanish contingent sent to Iraq after the 2003 invasion [in April 2003] was around thirteen hundred troops–only about 1 percent of the entire occupation force but the largest contingent from Western Europe after Britain and Italy.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Deepak Tripathi, Overcoming the Bush Legacy […]
4/15/2003
“Saddam even had a history of financing Islamist terrorists with links to bin Laden. Secret documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center in Baghdad in April 2003 prove that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden since the mid-1990s. The […]
4/15/2003
“Only in the footnotes of the [9/11] commission’s final report was it made clear that [senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission Dietrich] Snell’s entire authority for moving the origin of the 9/11 plot two years forward was the word of [9/11 mastermind] Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [KSM] himself, who had been tortured after his capture on […]