“In August 2002, Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin presented to the principals committee the intelligence community’s judgments about Iraq’s WMD activities. …his briefing concluded that: -Iraq had reconstituted its facilities for biological and chemical weapons. -There were 3,200 tons of chemical weapons the regime previously had that remained unaccounted for. -Saddam had a mobile biological […]
8/15/2002
Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice wrote: “Before leaving for Crawford [Texas], I took advantage of an interview with the BBC [on August 15, 2002] to say that there was a moral case and a national security argument for overthrowing Saddam. ‘We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing,’ I said. That was taken […]
8/15/2002
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, in August 2002: ” ‘If you’re asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are. It’s a fact, yes.’ “ [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Andrew Wander and Gregg Carlstrom, “Files Chart al-Qaeda’s Rise in Iraq,” Al Jazeera, Oct. […]
8/15/2002
“C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported. The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal […]
8/15/2002
“Between October and December 2001, [Defense Department official Mike] Maloof and [neoconservative scholar David] Wurmser, who called themselves ‘Team B,’ combed through a decade of CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) files looking to find hitherto-overlooked connections, particularly between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. …Once they had completed their analysis, Maloof and Wurmser presented their findings […]
8/15/2002
“Daniel Coleman, the FBI special agent whose knowledge of al-Qaeda was unrivaled, says that in August 2002 someone called him from [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s office…and asked him ‘to review everything’ on Iraq and the al-Qaeda connection. Coleman recalls: ‘We had already reviewed the material twice. Again we came up empty.’ Coleman…subsequently told the staffer […]
8/15/2002
The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) “was convened in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included [political advisor to President Bush Karl] Rove, [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice, the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin–and…[Vice presidential Chief of Staff Scooter] […]
8/15/2002
“Intelligence developed by NSA [National Security Agency] revealed that in August 2002 a French company called CIS Paris helped broker the sale to Iraq of twenty tons of a Chinese-made chemical called HTPB, which was used to make solid fuel for ballistic missiles.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – […]
8/15/2002
In his August 15, 2002, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled, ‘Don’t Attack Saddam,’ former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft “wrote that ‘scant evidence’ connects Saddam Hussein to terrorism and that Saddam was ‘unlikely to risk his investment in weapons of mass destruction, much less his country, by handing such weapons to terrorists who […]
8/15/2002
In August 2002, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas “Feith put together the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon. A larger, more powerful successor to the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group that Feith ran with [neoconservative scholar] David Wurmser and [Defense Department official] Michael Maloof, the OSP’s mission was to ferret out evidence that […]