Regarding the war in Iraq, National Security Advisor Condoleezza “Rice helped conceive it and was one of its chief advocates, and when the president [Bush] finally asked her, point-blank in the Oval office in December 2002, if he should take the country to war, she said yes.” [The 15th of the month used for date […]
12/15/2002
“One former CIA officer recalls a conversation he had in December 2002 with the chief of the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations, the unit within the CIA that was supposed to be in charge of recruiting spies and collecting intelligence on WMD in Iraq and other countries. The division chief admitted during […]
12/15/2002
“In December [2002], two Afghan prisoners held by the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base [Afghanistan] were beaten to death by their interrogators. …A third prisoner…had died of hypothermia under the auspices of the CIA in the notorious prison known as the ‘Salt Pit,’ also in Afghanistan.” [The 15th of the month used for date […]
12/15/2002
In his treatise ‘Loyalty and Enmity,’ written in December 2002, al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri stated: ” ‘The issue [of a coalition to evict Iraq’s army from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion] is not about helping infidel forces against the forces of the Baathist Saddam [Hussein]; instead, it is about the usurpation of the […]
12/15/2002
In his treatise ‘Loyalty and Enmity,’ written in December 2002, al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri stated: ” ‘Palestine is torn asunder and demolished, its children slaughtered every day–yet its Arab neighbors respond with either silence or connivance. Iraq is victim to one campaign after another, in order to slay its Muslim populace, divide the […]
12/15/2002
In his treatise ‘Loyalty and Enmity,’ written in December 2002, al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri quoted the Koran, verse 5:51-53: ” ‘Allah Most High said: *O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors; they are but friends and protectors to each other. Whoever among you […]
12/15/2002
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said: “Ultimately, President Bush concluded that he had to remove Saddam’s regime from power by war. In my judgment, his moment of decision came in December 2002, when the Iraqi regime made its unsatisfactory WMD declaration to the United Nations. From that point forward, it seemed to me, […]
12/15/2002
According to the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, completed December 2002: “CIA briefers sensed that [President] Bush’s national security cabinet viewed terrorism as the kind of phenomenon it had been during the 1980s: potent but limited, a theatrical sort of threat that could produce episodic public crises but did not jeopardize the fundamental security of […]
12/15/2002
Excerpts from CIA Counterterrorist Center Director Cofer Black which appeared in the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, completed December 2002, said: “Despite several years of effort the CIA had been unable to recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda leadership. Black knew that the CIA was in trouble ‘without penetrations of [the] UBL […]
12/15/2002
According to the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, issued in December 2002, CIA Director George Tenet said: ” ‘In hindsight, I wish I had said, *Let’s take the whole [al Qaeda] enterprise down* and put five hundred more people there sooner.’ …’We never had enough officers from the Directorate of Operations,’ recalled one former chief […]