“In August [13-14] 2007, the ABA [American Bar Association] spoke to the President’s [Bush’s] Executive Order [No. 13400] of July 20, 2007, which authorized the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ program. It argued that the Executive Order was inconsistent with U.S. obligations under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. In a Recommendation adopted by its House of […]
8/12/2007
“A former Central Command official told the New York Times in [August 12] 2007, ‘If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators [drones] across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We’d have the *black* Special Forces you most need to conduct precision operations. […]
8/12/2007
In a New York Times article on August 12, 2007, “Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s counterintelligence center, noted that from late 2002 to early 2003, ‘the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,’ including counterterrorism specialists and paramilitary operatives. This had such second-order […]
8/9/2007
“[L]ast August [9, 2007], after the New Yorker reported the latest in a string of private memos sent to the U.S. government by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) asserting that U.S. interrogation techniques were ‘tantamount to torture,’ President Bush said curtly, ‘We don’t torture.’ ” – Massimo Calabresi, “Bush’s Dangerous Torture(d) Stance,” […]
8/9/2007
In Iraq, “Having former insurgents as guides also meant there was suddenly much more information on which to act, both because the insurgents were talking but also because they were no longer violently preventing civilians from doing so. Indeed, there were so many new informants that it made it difficult for the remaining insurgents to […]
8/9/2007
In an article on August 9, 2007, journalists “Warren Strobel, John Walcott, and Nancy A. Youssef…reported that [Vice President Dick] Cheney had proposed launching air strikes ‘at suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.’ ” – Craig Unger, The Fall of the House […]
8/8/2007
Regarding the CIA’s secret detention program: “Because the CIA did not maintain any prison facilities, it had to rely on a network of allied countries to provide locations where it could detain and interrogate terror suspects. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the C.I.A., was reported to have stated [in an August […]
8/5/2007
“The Protect America Act [which removed the warrant requirement for monitoring foreign intelligence targets ‘reasonably believed’ to be outside the U.S.] was passed during a Saturday session on August 4 [2007] but not signed into law by President Bush until the next morning [August 5, 2007].” – James Bamford, The Shadow Factory, Page 304 […]
8/1/2007
“In August [1] 2007…Senator Barack Obama [D-IL] had declared Afghanistan ‘the war that has to be won.’ He pledged to deploy more troops and increase reconstruction funds. ‘We will not repeat the mistake of the past, when we turned our back on Afghanistan,’ he had said. ‘As 9/11 showed us, the security of Afghanistan and […]
7/31/2007
“Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell…indicated that the warrantless eavesdropping program was only one program of many highly secret NSA [National Security Agency] programs approved by [President] Bush following the attacks on 9/11. ‘This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those […]