In January 2003, an unnamed official in the CIA was told, ” ‘if [President] Bush wants to go to war, it’s your job to give him a reason to do so,’ according to the official. It was the first time the official had ever heard anyone order employees to slant their analysis for political purposes.” […]
1/15/2003
“A National Intelligence Council paper in January 2003 titled, ‘Can Iraq Ever Become a Democracy?’ said that ‘Iraqi political culture is so imbued with norms alien to the democratic experience…that it may resist the most vigorous and prolonged democratic treatments.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – George Tenet […]
1/15/2003
“The [National Intelligence Council’s] thirty-eight page report [published in January 2003], entitled ‘Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq,’ chronicled a long list of potential problems. …The key judgments of the report are the following: ‘The building of an Iraqi democracy would be a long, difficult and probably turbulent process with potential for backsliding into Iraq’s tradition […]
1/15/2003
“In January 2003, the National Intelligence Council, a CIA-led panel of intelligence specialists, had cautioned that building democracy in Iraq would be difficult because of its authoritarian history and warned of the risk that the American forces would be seen as occupiers. ‘Attitudes toward a foreign military force would depend largely on the progress made […]
1/15/2003
On January 15, 2003, President “Bush met with the war cabinet to hear the details of the planned food relief and other humanitarian efforts [for Iraq]. …’This is an opportunity to change the image of the United States,’ the president said. ‘We need to make the most of these humanitarian aid efforts in our public […]
1/15/2003
“In January 2003, Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer in charge of the Middle East, produced a high-level report examining the challenges the Bush administration would face in a post-Saddam Iraq. The paper made the obvious point: turning Iraq into a state even resembling a liberal democracy would be difficult.” [The 15th of the month […]
1/15/2003
“It was in this WINPAC [Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center] office that [author James] Bamford’s informant worked at the turn of the year 2002-2003. In January [2003] the informant’s boss at WINPAC convened about fifty people in a meeting to bolster the case for WMDs, described by Bamford in A Pretext for War. […]
1/15/2003
On January 15, 2003, General Counsel of the U.S. Navy Alberto “Mora delivered an unsigned draft memo [pushing for reform at Guantanamo] to [legal counsel to Secretary of Defense Jim] Haynes and said that he planned to ‘sign it out’ that afternoon–making it an official document–unless the harsh interrogation techniques were suspended. Mora’s draft memo […]
1/15/2003
“By January 2003, a plan for [taking control of] Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961–but […]
1/13/2003
Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke with President Bush after a meeting in the Oval Office on January 13, 2003. “As Powell remembered the conversation, Bush said, ‘ *I really think I’m going to have to take this guy [Saddam] out.* And I said, ‘Okay, we’ll continue to see if we can find a diplomatic […]