After the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, “Establishing a security regime in the vacuum was of paramount importance. But in March 2002, Vice President [Dick] Cheney and Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld were already working on the plan to invade Iraq. Cheney publicly rejected the idea of expanding the international peacekeeping force beyond Kabul. […]
3/19/2002
Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood was quoted in the Pakistani newspaper The News on March 19, 2002. ” ‘I met [Taliban leader] Mullah [Mohammad] Omar, members of his council of ministers as well as Osama bin Laden only to seek their cooperation in pursuing the goals of my organization,’ he said.” – Ahmed Rashid, […]
3/19/2002
“Operation Anaconda [from March 1-19, 2002] marked the end of the opening phase of the battle [in Afghanistan]. Like any war, our campaign in Afghanistan had not gone perfectly. But in six months, we had removed the Taliban from power, destroyed the al Qaeda training camps, liberated more than twenty-six million people from unspeakable brutality, […]
3/18/2002
“On March 18, members of the UK Parliament had voted in favor of the Iraq War. But by that time, the war was already under way. Some U.S. troops had entered the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Special forces were destroying Iraqi missile launchpads. U.S. and UK aircraft were bombing key sites in Baghdad and […]
3/18/2002
In an interview on March 18, 2002, CIA Deputy Director of Operations Thomas Twetten said: “…The CIA ignored Afghanistan and its civil war. Twetten felt there was nothing the United States could do to mediate the Afghan conflict or put the country back together again. There were too many other challenges in a world so […]
3/17/2002
“The British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, wrote to the Prime Minister’s [Tony Blair’s] Office in London about a meeting he had had with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002 [regarding an invasion of Iraq]: ‘It would be a tough sell for us domestically, and probably tougher elsewhere in Europe. The […]
3/17/2002
“At a March 17 [2002] lunch with England’s ambassador to the United States, Christopher Meyer, [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz tried to convince the British that Iraq was tied to the first World Trade Center attack.” – Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris, Page 82 […]
3/15/2002
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “321. Sir David Omand, the Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office from 2002 to 2005, told the Inquiry that, in March 2002, the Security Service judged that the ‘threat from terrorism from Saddam’s own intelligence apparatus in the event of an intervention […]
3/15/2002
“…in March 2002, as preparation for the Iraq War was well underway, CIA deputy director John McLaughlin told senior members of [President] Bush’s national security team that the CIA’s presence in Afghanistan would be scaled back. Thereafter, the CIA closed bases in Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, and Kandahar and delayed an $80 million plan for training […]
3/15/2002
“We now know that the chase [for al Qaeda leaders] was given up in March 2002–just three months after the fall of Kandahar [Afghanistan]–when the Arabic- and Persian-speaking U.S. SOF [Special Operations Forces] teams were moved out of Afghanistan to train for Iraq and surveillance satellites were pulled from the skies over Afghanistan and redirected […]