In The Iraq War Reader, Sarah Graham-Brown and Chris Toensing wrote: “By October [2002], U.S. and British planes had bombed Iraqi targets 46 times, and ‘clashes’ in the no-fly zones picked up again after the November 8 U.N. resolution.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Eds. Micah L. Sifry […]
10/15/2002
“…with lawmakers persuaded about what would go wrong if America did not attack Iraq, [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were confronted with a roster of what could go wrong if it did. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld had scrawled out by hand a list of all the possible setbacks… Marked ‘SECRET’ and dated […]
10/15/2002
In the Chilcot inquiry, the British public inquiry into their involvement in the war in Iraq, Attorney General Lord “Goldsmith reveals that as early as October 2002 he learned that [Prime Minister Tony] Blair ‘had indicated to President Bush that he would join the US in acting without a second [UN] resolution.’ Goldsmith told the […]
10/15/2002
According to a CIA senior executive memorandum on February 21, 2003: ” ‘Close al Qaeda associate [Abu Musab] al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of October 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in […]
10/15/2002
In October 2002, “U.S. envoy James Kelly had traveled to North Korea to confront the regime of Kim Jong Il with fresh evidence that its nuclear programs were designed to produce weapons. Virtually everyone expected the North Koreans to dismiss the United States’ findings and downplay their own nuclear ambitions. Instead, the North Koreans not […]
10/15/2002
“In October 2002, North Korea had revealed its secret uranium enrichment program–a clear violation of the Clinton-era Agreed Framework. In response, Washington had canceled the fuel oil assistance that constituted its end of the agreement. Pyongyang then ejected U.N. monitors and announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” [The 15th of the month used […]
10/15/2002
“…the North Koreans admitted in October 2002 that they had a major weapons program, which presented the Bush administration with a crisis as it prepared to go to war with Iraq for the same reason.” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Elisabeth Bumiller, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, Pages […]
10/15/2002
“As [al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-] Zawahiri explained to a television audience in October 2002, five months before the American and British invasion of Iraq, such an invasion world ‘confirm Israel’s uncontested monopoly over weapons of mass destruction in the region, so as to ensure the submission of Arab and Islamic states to its wishes […]
10/15/2002
“A sheaf of fabricated documents arrived from Italy to muddy the waters in October 2002 and the President [Bush] included the yellowcake story in his State of the Union address in January [2003]–the soon-to-be-exploded sixteen words that ‘the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…’ Eventually the […]
10/15/2002
“In a classified three-page memo dated October 15, 2002, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld listed 29 things that could go wrong in an Iraq war. He reviewed it with the president [Bush] and the NSC [National Security Council]. …item Number 13 said, ‘U.S. could fail to find WMD on the ground.’ ” – Bob Woodward, […]