Iraq War 2003 Timeline - Revision history

Melissa Jones: changed 'timeline' category to plural so other timelines can be added

2010-12-13T16:31:12Z

changed 'timeline' category to plural so other timelines can be added

Idrees: /* November */

2010-07-09T23:10:14Z

November

Idrees: /* October */

2010-07-09T23:09:35Z

October

Idrees: /* September */

2010-07-09T23:06:46Z

September

Idrees: /* October */

2010-07-09T21:20:55Z

October

Idrees: /* September */

2010-07-09T21:16:55Z

September

Idrees: /* September */

2010-07-09T21:14:20Z

September

Idrees: /* September */

2010-07-09T21:11:43Z

September

Idrees: /* April */

2010-06-25T02:40:39Z

April

David: /* Related Articles */

2010-06-19T07:29:58Z

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 ==Related Articles==
 *[http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/ Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 2/14/08)], ''Mother Jones'', accessed 22 March 2008
-[[category:Iraq War 2003]][[Category:Timeline]]
+[[category:Iraq War 2003]][[Category:Timelines]]

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 *11 November - Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, senior Al Qaeda official in charge of the network's training camp in Khalden, Afghanistan, is captured in Pakistan.
 *21 November - According to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'" Woodward adds that, immediately after Rumsfeld and [General Tommy] Franks work out a deal under which Franks can spend any money he needs. "And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the preparations in Kuwait, specifically to make war possible."
-*30 November - In a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, Dick Cheney lays out what will come to be known as the One Percent Doctrine. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." The quote is from Ron Suskind's 2006 book, "The One Percent Doctrine." "As to 'evidence,'" Suskind writes, "the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
+*30 November - In a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, Dick Cheney lays out what will come to be known as the [[One Percent Doctrine]]. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response." The quote is from Ron Suskind's 2006 book, "The One Percent Doctrine." "As to 'evidence,'" Suskind writes, "the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
 ===December===
 *01 December - According to Bob Woodward, Rumsfeld orders Franks to begin work on an Iraq war plan. Bush will meet with military leaders regarding the plan on a regular basis starting late December, despite public assurances that the administration is seeking a diplomatic solution to its showdown with Saddam.

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 ===October===
-Douglas Feith sets up the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group to sift through raw intelligence data and cherry pick information to provide Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld with intelligence on-demand.<ref>Suskind (2004): 24</ref>
+Douglas Feith sets up the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group to sift through raw intelligence data and cherry pick information to provide Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld with intelligence on-demand.<ref>Suskind (2006): 24</ref>
 *01. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA receives a report from Italian intelligence describing a public visit by an Iraqi diplomat to Niger in 1999 and suggesting that the diplomat's covert purpose was to procure yellowcake uranium. The American intelligence community dismisses the report as "amateurish and unsubstantiated" but it is nevertheless sent directly to the Vice President. It is the one of the first examples of "stovepiping," the practice whereby Bush officials, in the words of former National Security Council member Kenneth Pollack, "dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership." On the cover of its first post-9/11 issue, the [[Weekly Standard]] runs the word WANTED under pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
 *29. The Weekly Standard runs an article entitled "Why Iraq?" It alleges that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Europe and that Iraq is linked to the anthrax attacks in America (the latter because one expert thinks it is unlikely a terrorist group could develop anthrax on its own). It hints at Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. And, for a kicker, "If all we do is contain Saddam's Iraq, it is a virtual certainty that Baghdad will soon have nuclear weapons."

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 *13. at a meeting of Principals at Camp David, Paul Wolfowitz broaches the prospects of attacking Iraq.<ref>Jason Leopold, [http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/032008a.html The Road to 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'], ''ConsortiumNews.com'', 20 March 2008</ref>
 *16. During the infamous 'Dark Side' interivew, Dick Cheney is asked by host Tim Russert, if 'we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to [9/11]?'. Cheney replies: 'No.'
-*17. The War on Terror officially begins as Bush assigns tasks to 17 top officials of the government. 'The CIA is first,' he announces.<ref>Suskind (2004): 18-19</ref>
+*17. The War on Terror officially begins as Bush assigns tasks to 17 top officials of the government. 'The CIA is first,' he announces.<ref>Suskind (2006): 18-19</ref>
 *18. Ahmed Chalabi is a guest speaker at a two-day meeting at the Pentagon of the Defense Policy Board, an influential body packed with high-level Defense officials and opinion makers and chaired by Richard Perle, according to an article in Vanity Fair. ("The Path to War," May 2004)
-*19. President Bush tells CIA chief George Tenet, "I want to know about links between Saddam and al Qaeda. The Vice President knows some things that might be helpful." Vice President Cheney tells Tenet about a report that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with senior Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Tenet promises to investigate. Two days later, Tenet reports back: CIA's Prague office thinks the Atta story "doesn't add up." Moreover, the intelligence community knows that Atta's credit card and phone were used in Virginia during the period in question. Cheney, however, will continue to cite the alleged meeting in public appearances.<ref>Suskind (2004): 23</ref>
+*19. President Bush tells CIA chief George Tenet, "I want to know about links between Saddam and al Qaeda. The Vice President knows some things that might be helpful." Vice President Cheney tells Tenet about a report that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with senior Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. Tenet promises to investigate. Two days later, Tenet reports back: CIA's Prague office thinks the Atta story "doesn't add up." Moreover, the intelligence community knows that Atta's credit card and phone were used in Virginia during the period in question. Cheney, however, will continue to cite the alleged meeting in public appearances.<ref>Suskind (2006): 23</ref>
 *20. A letter to President Bush from the neoconservative [[Project for the New American Century]] says, "Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." Signatories include [[The New Republic]] editor [[Martin Peretz]].
 **Douglas J. Feith writes to Donald Rumsfeld and "expresse[s] disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. [He] suggest[s] instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq."

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 ===October===
 *01. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA receives a report from Italian intelligence describing a public visit by an Iraqi diplomat to Niger in 1999 and suggesting that the diplomat's covert purpose was to procure yellowcake uranium. The American intelligence community dismisses the report as "amateurish and unsubstantiated" but it is nevertheless sent directly to the Vice President. It is the one of the first examples of "stovepiping," the practice whereby Bush officials, in the words of former National Security Council member Kenneth Pollack, "dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership." On the cover of its first post-9/11 issue, the [[Weekly Standard]] runs the word WANTED under pictures of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
 *29. The Weekly Standard runs an article entitled "Why Iraq?" It alleges that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Europe and that Iraq is linked to the anthrax attacks in America (the latter because one expert thinks it is unlikely a terrorist group could develop anthrax on its own). It hints at Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks. And, for a kicker, "If all we do is contain Saddam's Iraq, it is a virtual certainty that Baghdad will soon have nuclear weapons."

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 ===April===
 *09. Mohammad Atta allegedly meets with senior Iraqi intelligence officials at the Iraqi embassy in Prague. The 9/11 Report (Section 7) will later debunk this claim: "The FBI has gathered evidence indicating that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 (as evidenced by a bank surveillance camera photo), and in Coral Springs, Florida, on April 11, where heleased an apartment. On April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta's cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida No evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001." Dick Cheney will nevertheless repeatedly invoke the meeting as evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
-*30. According to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Paul Wolfowitz challenges Clarke at a meeting: "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack in New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages doesn't mean that they don't exist."
+*30. According to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Paul Wolfowitz cited [[Laurie Mylroie]]'s book Study of Revenge to allege a link between Iraq and the 1993 WTC attack. He challenged Clarke at a meeting: "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack in New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages doesn't mean that they don't exist."<ref>Clarke (2004): 231-232</ref>
 ===July===
 *10. On or around this date National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is briefed by CIA director George Tenet and counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black about terror threats. Bob Woodward, in his book "State of Denial," reports that Tenet and Black decided they had to request a dramatic, "out-of-cycle" meeting with Rice to convey their anxiety over the chance of an attack against American interests, possibly within the United States. It was, according to Woodward, the "starkest warning they had given the White House" on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Rice, in Woodward's account, was "polite," but Tenet and Black "felt the brush-off."When Woodward's book came out, in October 2006, Rice denied that the meeting--which the State Dept. confirmed took place--was exceptional, and disputed Woodward's characterization. What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States," she said. "[A]nd the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible.