“By January 2002, the U.S. military had established a prison camp at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the ‘illegal enemy combatants’ it was capturing in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The White House lawyers had picked the location because of its unique legal status. Leased in perpetuity to the United States by the pre-Castro […]
1/15/2002
“…in January of 2002, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz actually directed the under secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, to set up an operation within his office that would serve as a de facto intelligence unit, independent of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, to prove an Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship. The fact that […]
1/14/2002
President George W. Bush on continued questions on our reliance, as a nation, on foreign oil: “We are too reliant upon foreign sources of crude oil. We’ve got to do a better job of not only conserving energy, but it seems to make sense to me that when we’ve got energy on our own hemisphere, and […]
1/14/2002
On January 14, 2002, “a little-noticed article in The Washington Times reported that the Pentagon had launched its own secret effort to develop a case for attacking Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein as part of the war on terrorism. …Established under [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz by [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, […]
1/12/2002
“On January 12, 2002, [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf made an important televised speech to the nation in which he said that Pakistan would no longer tolerate organizations that practiced terrorism in the name of religion.” – Peter Bergen, The Longest War, Page 256 […]
1/11/2002
During a Pentagon Briefing on January 11, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist’s question about whether the ICRC and other non-governmental organizations would be given access to the detainees: “… They will be handled not as prisoners of wars, because they’re not, but as unlawful combatants. The — as I understand it, […]
1/11/2002
“A [Gallup] poll taken [from January 11-14, 2002] just before the ‘axis of evil’ speech [by President Bush] showed that 77 percent of Americans supported military action in Iraq and just 17 percent opposed it.” – Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Page 191 […]
1/11/2002
“As the first load of prisoners arrived at the new military prison camp at Guantánamo, Cuba, on January 11, 2002, he [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld] declared them ‘unlawful combatants’ who ‘do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.’ In fact, the Geneva Conventions provide explicit protections to anyone taken prisoner in an international […]
1/11/2002
“Military officials said they had culled the most dangerous of the roughly 10,000 prisoners caught there [Afghanistan] and shipped them to Guantánamo Bay. ‘These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 to bring it down,’ Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said as […]
1/11/2002
On January 11, 2002, Chief Legal Advisor to the Department of State William H. Taft IV “submitted the State Department’s response to [Office of Legal Counsel John] Yoo’s [January 9, 2002] memorandum [which denied Geneva Convention protections to al-Qaeda and the Taliban]. Taft described Yoo’s reasoning as ‘seriously flawed,’ ‘procedurally impossible,’ and ‘unsound.’ Taft pointed […]