“In his State of the Union address [on January 20, 2004], the president [Bush] again downgrades his rhetoric on WMDs in the wake of [Iraq Survey Group leader] David Kay’s failure to find Saddam’s stockpiles: …’Had we failed to act, the dictator’s [Saddam’s] weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. Had we […]
1/19/2004
“Vice President [Dick] Cheney says he believes ‘the jury’s still out’ on whether Iraq had the chemical and biological weapons that were the Bush administration’s justification for war. ‘I am a long way at this stage from concluding that somehow there was some fundamental flaw in our intelligence,’ Cheney said in an interview with USA […]
1/19/2004
Vice President Dick “Cheney said he’s effective working behind the scenes and doesn’t believe voters will choose the next president based on running mates. ‘Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?’ he said. ‘It’s a nice way to operate, actually.’ ” – Judy Keen, “Cheney […]
1/16/2004
“In spring 2002, the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] demanded that it be given access to prisoners under rendition. Instead, CIA lawyers further twisted legal boundaries by establishing a new category of prisoner: Persons Under Control, or PUC. Anyone held as PUC was automatically denied access to the ICRC, and even his existence […]
1/15/2004
“Ex-soldiers from the Iraqi army staged angry protests in Basra [Iraq] in January 2004. British troops moved in to control them.” [The 15th of the month for date sorting purpose only] – Andrew Langley, Bush, Blair, and Iraq: Days of Decision, Page 36 […]
1/15/2004
In an article for the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Colin Powell “defended the Bush doctrine. ‘U.S. strategy is widely accused of being unilateralist by design,’ he wrote, ‘It isn’t. It is often accused of being imbalanced in favor of military methods. It isn’t.’ Arguing that Bush’s war on terrorism and […]
1/15/2004
“In January 2004 American forces had captured an al Qaeda courier who was carrying a letter from [al Qaeda in Iraq leader] Abu Musab al Zarqawi to al Qaeda leaders. The letter detailed Zarqawi’s plan to foment sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni in Iraq by ‘targeting and striking [Shiite] religious, political, and military symbols’ […]
1/15/2004
“Even as late as January 15, 2004, U.S. Vice President [Dick] Cheney, referring to the threat of a terrorist attack in the United States, is reported to have said that the battle [against terrorism], like the Cold War, could last generations and that a new kind of mobilization was needed, requiring more overseas bases so […]
1/15/2004
In January 2004, “Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the ‘top member of Al Qaeda’ whose statements became the basis for the [Bush] administration’s assertions that Saddam’s regime provided biological and chemical weapons training to al Qaeda members, recants his earlier claims.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Frank Rich, The Greatest […]
1/15/2004
“A [January] 2004 study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also detected a politically driven shift in intelligence assessments in 2002. It discovered a yawning gap between what was claimed and what was known, especially the ‘alliance’ between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The endowment reported: ‘There was and is no solid evidence […]