“On Friday, February 1 [2002], three days after the State of the Union speech that [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld later considered ‘not particularly in my area,’ he had [Central Command leader General Tommy] Franks back at the Pentagon….Franks told him he now had a war plan for Iraq that could be executed as a […]
1/31/2002
In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on January 31, 2002, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: ” ‘We will pursue [al-Qaeda’s] members by every means at our disposal. We will disrupt its plans, destroy its bases, arrest its members, break up its cells and choke off its finances. And our enemy is […]
1/31/2002
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke to a military audience at the National Defense University on January 31, 2002. ” ‘The notion that we could transform while cutting the defense budget over the past decade, Rumsfeld confessed, ‘was seductive but false.’…The events of 9/11 produced a level of fear and paranoia that made the canceling […]
1/30/2002
“On January 30, 2002, the agency [CIA] issued an unclassified report to Congress containing the phrase ‘Baghdad may be attempting to acquire materials that could aid in reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.’ Still, it was not highlighted and it was couched in very ambiguous-sounding language. Yet only a week or so later…as the item moved from […]
1/29/2002
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary”: “President Bush makes his ‘axis of evil’ speech.” – Commissioned by the Prime Minister The Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary,” IraqInquiry.org.uk, Jan. 29, 2002 […]
1/29/2002
“I was disturbed by the “axis of evil” speech, but not because of the French didn’t like it… For both France and England, traditional relationships with various Middle Eastern countries and especially Iraq were extremely important and not lightly sacrificed to some half-baked Bush version of an American Manifest Destiny. I took seriously the international […]
1/29/2002
President George W. Bush, when discussing the prevention of terrorist regimes: “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its […]
1/29/2002
“By late January 2002, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) was co-sponsoring a bill to set up what eventually became the 9/11 Commission. But both President Bush and Vice President [Dick] Cheney personally lobbied Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle [D-SD] to back off. ‘The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September […]
1/29/2002
President “Bush publicly rattled his saber, using his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002, to warn of an ‘axis of evil’ made up of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Each of the three, Bush said, was ‘arming to threaten the peace of our world’ with weapons of mass destruction and sponsorship of […]
1/29/2002
“On January 29 [2002], the president [Bush] brandished the phrase ‘axis of evil’ in the State of the Union address… North Korea was ‘arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction,’ Iran was ‘aggressively’ pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq had ‘plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a […]