“…journalist James Fallows argued in The Atlantic [in October 2004] that the coalition in Afghanistan never really had the opportunity to show whether it could provide order in the country. ‘The campaign in Afghanistan was warped and limited from the start,’ he writes, ‘by a pre-existing desire to save troops for Iraq.’ ” [The 15th […]
10/15/2004
By late [October] 2004…[Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi’s group in Iraq, Jamaat al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, had eclipsed al Qaeda in terms of both resources and brand power. Even so, Zarqawi willingly merged his group with the weaker al Qaeda and swore an oath to bin Laden, creating AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq].” [The 15th of the month […]
10/15/2004
“Frequently it will be said that 500,000 or 600,000 died [in Iraq] between 2003 and 2009. …The origins of this figure lie in the report of the leading medical journal Lancet published in October 2004 which purported to be a scientific analysis of deaths in Iraq. The figure they gave–600,000–led the news and became dominant, […]
10/15/2004
In an op-ed for The New York Times on October 15, 2004, former Commander of Coalition Forces General Tommy Franks wrote: ” ‘The war on terror can’t be divided into separate and unrelated wars–one in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq. Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same effort, a global effort to capture and […]
10/15/2004
“Consider this exchange on CNN, as reported by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books: ‘On October 15 [2004] former General George Joulwan discussed with Wolf Blitzer the need for Americans to do a better job of explaining to Muslims how much they’d done for them over the years. Blitzer agreed: ‘I don’t […]
10/15/2004
In a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney during October 2004, Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Colonel Derek J. Harvey said that “The M5 division of the Iraqi Intelligence Service gave money and training to recruits from Algeria, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. But Harvey saw no link to [terrorist] operations outside Iraq, no […]
10/14/2004
According to an Agence France-Presse article on October 14, 2004: “Muhammad Shahwani, the head of Iraq’s intelligence services, an agency directly funded by the CIA and outside the purview of the Iraqi government, stated that Iran was responsible for the assassination of a number of his agents. His agents had raided a number of safe […]
10/13/2004
From The Minneapolis Star Tribune, on October 13, 2004: “In 2004, the late former Republican governor of Minnesota, Elmer Andersen, announced…that for the first time in his life, he had decided to oppose an incumbent president of his own party because [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney, in his words, ‘believe their own spin. […]
10/12/2004
As stated in “The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – Executive Summary:” “334. On 12 October 2004, announcing the withdrawal of two lines of intelligence reporting which had contributed to the pre-conflict judgements on mobile biological production facilities and the regime’s intentions, MrStraw stated that he did: ‘… not accept, even with hindsight, that we were […]
10/12/2004
In response to presidential candidate John Kerry’s comment that he wanted to reduce terrorism to a level where it was merely a ‘nuisance,’ President Bush said, on October 12, 2004: ” ‘I couldn’t disagree more. Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by […]