Timeline
January 1, 2003
Two reports from the National Intelligence Council warn Bush that an Iraq invasion could spark sectarian violence and an anti-US insurgency. One says an occupation could "increase popular sympathy for terrorist objectives." They also express skepticism about the Niger uranium story.
The former head of Bush's office of faith-based initiatives, John DiIulio, tells Esquire, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
The CIA finally balks at being assigned over and over to confirm what it viewed as phony intelligence, according to a later report in The Washington Post. In an angry dispute, CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin tells Cheney's aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, "I'm not going back to the well on this. We've done our work."
January 3, 2003
January 9, 2003
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (and, two years later, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient), contradicts President Bush on the aluminum tubes intelligence in a presentation to the UN. ElBaradei says the "tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets. While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it." The New York Times reports that the CIA, the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and the NSA agree with the Bush Administration's view, while some in the INR (State) and the DOE (Energy) agree with ElBaradei. A senior Bush official tells the Times, "I think the Iraqis are spinning the IAEA."
Hans Blix appears before the UN on the same day as ElBaradei to comment on the Iraqi weapons declaration and to present an update on inspections. He reports that inspectors have found no "smoking guns" in Iraq after two months' work, and that they have not encountered any impediments from the Iraqis. He does say the Iraqi declaration was incomplete, and calls on the Iraqis to show more evidence of disarmament.
January 10, 2003
The Department of Homeland Security advises Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape to protect themselves against radiological or biological attack.
January 11, 2003
Donald Rumsfeld shows Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar the administration's war plans for Iraq and says, "You can count on this. This is going to happen." Two days later, Bush tells Colin Powell he has decided to go to war.
January 13, 2003
A State Department intelligence analyst working on Iraq's nuclear program sends an email to several members of the intelligence community arguing that "the uranium purchase agreement was probably a hoax."
January 20, 2003
President Bush signs National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, assigning to the Pentagon control over post-war Iraq. According to George Packer's book The Assassin's Gate, the State Department's "Future of Iraq" project has been making plans for Iraq's reconstruction for almost a year; the Defense Department will use little of State's work and will shut its officials out from crucial posts. With the directive, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), is created. Subsumed by the Coalition Provisional Authority six months later, it will be the first post-war authority in Iraq.
January 23, 2003
In a vote termed "an unusual triumph of privacy concerns," the Senate temporarily halts the activities of the Information Awareness Office, home of Total Information Awareness. Around this time, the logo for the program, which depicts an eye atop a pyramid surveying the globe, is removed from its website. The Defense Department issues an explanation.
January 24, 2003
The IAEA tells the Washington Post that the aluminum tubes often cited as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions are perfect fits for 81mm rockets used in many rocket launchers. One actually bears the imprint "Rocket." Says one official, "It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium, but you'd have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece."
January 27, 2003
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei tells the UN Security Council that inspections have turned up no evidence of nuclear weapons programs in Iraq. "[I]t appears that the aluminum tubes would be consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq and, unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."
The UN issues a press release regarding Iraq's response to Resolution 1441. "It would appear that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on substance in order to complete the disarmament task through inspection." The press release reports that UN weapons inspectors, after 60 days on the job, have inspected 106 locations and found "no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons programme."
January 28, 2003
In his State of the Union address, Bush says: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Various intelligence agencies know this to be false. The CIA made sure the claim was removed from an October 2002 speech Bush gave in Cincinnati.Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson later writes in the New York Times that he had already debunked this claim to administration officials.
(As a former journalist, I notice what Bush didn't say: He didn't actually say that Hussein sought uranium from Africa. He says that the British government had learned of it. In the news business, we learned to attribute any information to a source whenever possiblt. That way, you aren't responsible for the truth of the statement; the source you quote is.)
Bush's speech contains other highly questionable claims: "[Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." "From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq has mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Saddam builds and keeps "weapons of mass destruction."
"We will consult," Bush says. "But let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.
"This nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost and we dread the days of mourning that always come. We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes peace must be defended. A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail."
In his address, Bush also advocates "clean, hydrogen-powered vehicles." However, practical hydrogen fuel-cell technology is an estimated thirty years from providing vehicles that would pose any threat to the oil industry. Meanwhile, as shown in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, electric-powered cars were being driven in a successful pilot program in California; failure by the Bush administration to push electric-vehicle technology instead is cited in the film as one reason the electric car manufacturers were allowed to quietly recall and destroy all the test vehicles.
Bush also proposes to make his income tax cuts permanent. While he says these cuts are "for everyone who pays income taxes," they disproportionately benefit the richest 1% of Amwericans. These latter would also benefit mightily from his other tax proposal: to end the taxation of stock dividends.
Bush says, "I will send you a budget that increases discretionary spending by 4 percent next year--about as much as the average family's income is expected to grow. And that is a good benchmark for us. Federal spending should not rise any faster than the paychecks of American families." (Actually, under Bush and the Republican-led Congress, federal spending [and deficits] will grow at an unprecedented rate, especially once the Iraq war is under way.)
After praising Americans' acts of charity and volunteerism, Bush asks Congress to pass his faith-based initiative, which will funnel Americans' tax dollars to churches and religious organizations.
Bush's speech includes a six-paragraph section on AIDS, which asks for an additional $10 billion in U.S. aid to fight the disease in Africa and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on retroviral drugs. Condoms are never mentioned.
January 29, 2003
In a report entitled "Iraqi Support for Terrorism," the CIA revisits the claim that Mohammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. "Some information asserts that Atta met with IIS chief al-Ani, but the most reliable reporting to date casts doubt on this possibility.... A CIA and FBI review of intelligence and open-source reporting leads us to question the information."
A day after the President's State of the Union address, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld backs him up. "[Saddam's] regime has the design for a nuclear weapon; it was working on several different methods of enriching uranium, and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa. The regime plays host to terrorists, including al Qaeda."
United State ambassador to the UN John Negroponte, asked about IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei's skepticism that the aluminum tubes bound for Iraq were to be used in a centrifuge, responds, "If your question to me is, 'Are we convinced that those tubes were designed and are being, were intended, for enrichment of uranium?' The answer is definitively yes."
January 30, 2003
The White House announces the launch of Operation TIPS, a program to enlist "millions of American transportation workers, truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, and utility employees in the effort to prevent terrorism and crime."
January 31, 2003
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush meet in the Oval office to discuss the impending invasion of Iraq. A memo of the private meeting written by two senior British officials later reveals that Bush and Blair were aware that no WMDs had been found and that it was possible that they never would be, but Bush, determined to invade, spent the meeting discussing ways in which the two could justify the invasion.
According to the memo, President Bush tells British PM Tony Blair he plans to invade Iraq even if UN inspectors find no evidence of banned Iraqi weapons programs. He also says he will not need a second UN resolution condemning Iraq. Blair gives assurances that he's "solidly with the president."
The memo has Bush telling Blair the US is casting around for a stronger pretext to invade and that it once considered "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]." Bush adds that he thinks it "unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between [Iraq's] different religious and ethnic groups" after the attack.
During a news conference following their meeting, Bush tells the press that "Saddam is not disarming; this issue will come to a head in a matter of weeks, not months."
February 1, 2003:
Officials in the Bush Administration come together to prepare for Secretary of State Powell's February 5 speech to the UN, in which Powell will put all credible US evidence on the table and make the case for war to the international community. Powell reads an early draft based on work down by Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and, finding the material poorly sourced and misleading, throws several pages in the air and exclaims, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit." The preparations will go on for four days and three nights. Intense scrutiny will be applied to assertions made routinely by Cheney and others, in hopes that Powell will commit himself to only the very best of American intelligence. One 38-page list of allegations against Iraq is whittled down to six pages by Powell and his team.
February 4, 2003
CIA agent Tyler Drumheller makes a personal appeal by phone to George Tenet for Curveball's intelligence to be deleted from Colin Powell's February 5 speech to the UN. However, attendees at preparatory meetings with Powell say no one from CIA ever mentioned Drumheller or the name Curveball. Powell himself will comment later that Tenet assured him the reporting was solid. Says Powell, "What really made me not pleased was they had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it."
The only American intelligence official to ever actually meet Curveball reads a portion of Powell's upcoming UN speech in order to vet statements about mobile weapons labs. Afterwards, the official writes to his superior at the CIA:"I believe I am still the only United States Government (USG) person to have had direct access to him. There are a few issues associated with that contact that warrant further explanation, in my opinion, before using him as the backbone for the Iraqi mobile program. I do have a concern with the validity of the information based on CURVE BALL were having major handling issues with him and were attempting to determine, if in fact, CURVE BALL was who he said he was. These issues, in my opinion, warrant further inquiry, before we use the information as the backbone of one of our major findings of the existence of a continuing Iraqi BW program!" His superior responds, "As I said last night, let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and that the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."
February 5, 2003
Colin Powell addresses the UN in an attempt to sway world opinion in favor of war in Iraq. Powell makes a series of inaccurate statements that will badly tarnish his reputation.Powell says, "I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al-Qaida." This is al-Libi, who provided information under torture and will recant everything. Powell highlights Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warns that Iraq's mobile labs can brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people." Curveball has been doubted for some time by intelligence agencies at home and abroad. In fact, the senior German intelligence officer who supervised Curveball's case later tells the Los Angeles Times that when his colleagues hear Powell cite Curveball, "We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven." Powell also says that Saddam's son Qusay has ordered WMD removed from palace complexes; that key WMD files are being driven around Iraq by intelligence agents; that bioweapons warheads have been distributed to the Iraqi military; that a water truck at an Iraqi military installation is a "decontamination vehicle" for chemical weapons; that Iraq has drones it can use for bioweapons attacks; and that WMD experts have been corralled into one of Saddam's guest houses. Every one of those claims has been flagged by an congressional intelligence assessment of the speech as "WEAK."
February 6, 2003
Bush follows Powell's presentation with a national address reiterating the administration's standard claims: Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, possesses "at least seven mobile factories" for germ warfare, and harbors terrorist networks. Bush adds that Iraq has developed spray devices for chemical and biological weapons that could be attached to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). "A UAV launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland." The U.S. government agency most knowledgeable about UAVs, the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center, wrote months earlier in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that "U.S. Air Force does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance." A senior analyst with the Air Force will express shock months later, saying, "We were pretty sure this thing was dead."
February 7, 2003
Three State Department bureau chiefs prepare a secret memo for their superior and cite "serious planning gaps for post-conflict public security and humanitarian assistance." They write that "a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally." They advocate that the State Department stand strong against the Pentagon, which is ignoring the State Department's work in preparation for post-invasion Iraq.
Ashcroft, Ridge, and Mueller raise the terror alert level to orange. Ashcroft says, "Recent intelligence reports suggest that Al Qaeda leaders have emphasized planning for attacks on apartment buildings, hotels, and other soft or lightly secured targets in the United States."
Donald Rumsfeld ballparks the length of the coming war at a "town hall" meeting, on an Air Force base. "It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
February 8, 2003
The Los Angeles Times reports in 2005: "Three days after Powell's speech, the U.N.'s Team Bravo conducted the first search of Curveball's former work site. The raid by the American-led biological weapons experts lasted 3 & 1/2 hours. It was long enough to prove Curveball had lied."
February 14, 2003
Hans Blix appears before the UN Security Council and says his inspectors have enjoyed uninhibited access to 300 sites over a period of 11 weeks. Everything is in accordance with the Iraqi weapons declaration, and no weapons of mass destruction have been found. He singles out Colin Powell's assertion to the UN that trucks found in Iraq are mobile weapons labs, saying that the trucks, photographed weeks apart, could have easily been engaged in "routine activity."
February 15, 2003
Anti-war protesters mob cities worldwide. A crowd at the United Nations is estimated by police at 100,000.
February 20, 2003
In an interview with PBS's NewsHour, Donald Rumsfeld has the following exchange with Jim Lehrer.
Q: Do you expect the invasion, if it com es, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?
A: There is no question but that [the troops] would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda would not let them do.
He will later deny saying that America would be welcomed--"Never said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. I may look like somebody else."--even though a transcript of the interview is still on the Department of Defense web site.
February 21, 2003
Retired Army Lt. General Jay Garner, who has been tapped to head the body in charge of Iraq reconstruction efforts, initially known as the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), brings relevant parties together for a "rock drill" to hash out unanswered questions about post-invasion Iraq. Garner had previously spearheaded humanitarian efforts in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, but at the time of his appointment was president of defense contractor SYColeman, which designs missile communications and targeting systems. A weekend of diagrams and presentations reveals serious holes in the war plan, two of the most important being that there is no plan for policing or any thoughts on the makeup of an I raqi government. Garner's second-in-command notes the plans he witnessed were "overly optimistic" and lacked "reality." A report about the "rock drill" forecasts much of what goes awry in Iraq.
February 23, 2003
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, in a short article for the American Enterprise Institute, writes the "terrified and brutalized people of Iraq will rejoice at the downfall of Saddam Hussein." He adds, "U.N. weapons inspectors are being seriously deceived. It reminds me of the way the Nazis hoodwinked Red Cross officials."
February 25, 2003
Rumsfeld demands that two of Jay Garner's most qualified team members be let go. One is Tom Warrick, who has led the State Department's work on regime change issues and has attended a conference of Iraqi opposition leaders, many of whom are opposed to Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress taking control.
General Eric Shinseki tells the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Defense Department's estimate of troops needed for occupying Iraq is too low and says "several hundred thousand soldiers" will be needed. (FDCH Political Transcript, 02/25/03)
February 27, 2003
Paul Wolfowitz, appearing before Congress responds that Shinseki's estimate of hundreds of thousands of troops is "wildly off the mark." Says Wolfowitz, "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine."
Rumsfeld names Shinseki's successor one year before the end of Shinseki's term, making him a lame duck and an example to the rest of the military. Three months after Shinseki's comments, former Army secretary Thomas White will admit that he was right.
OHRA chief Gen. Jay Garner prepares a document for Rumsfeld decrying the fact that his team has only $27 million to rebuild Iraq. Garner forecasts the cost of reconstruction to be upwards of $12 billion. Shortly before Garner deploys to the Middle East, Rumsfeld tells him, "If you think we're spending our money on that, you're wrong. We're not doing that. They're going to spend their money rebuilding their country." (By fall 2006, the US is spending $2 billion a week in Iraq.)
Diplomat John Brady Kiesling resigns his post at the US embassy in Greece with a scathing letter to Colin Powell. "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security. We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far."
February 28, 2003
Gen. Jay Garner goes to the White House to meet President Bush for the first time. Garner tells the assembled parties that four of the nine tasks his small team at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) are supposed to be in charge of are plainly beyond their capabilities, including dismantling weapons of mass destruction, defeating terrorists, and reshaping the Iraqi military. He suggests that OHRA will need 200,000-300,000 Iraqi army troops for reconstruction.
March 1, 2003
Iraq destroys four missiles, meeting a U.N. deadline to begin disarming.
March 3, 2003
March 5, 2003
"I have no qualms about our strategic plan" for Iraq, Sen. John McCain tells the Hartford Courant.
March 7, 2003
Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, appears before the Security Council and says that searches have found "no evidence" of mobile biological production facilities in Iraq. He also says that the Iraqis are cooperating with the inspectors. The IAEA's ElBaradei also speaks and says, "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq." He says the Niger uranium documents are "not authentic."
March 8, 2003
President Bush tells the nation, "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq."
Halliburton is awarded a $7 billion reconstruction contract over the objections of Army Corps of Engineers procurement officer Bunnatine Greenhouse. Testifying before Congress, she later calls the contract "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed." She is demoted in short order.
Joseph Wilson appears on CNN and is asked to comment on ElBaradei's appearance at the U.N. the day before, in which ElBaradei called the Niger uranium document forgeries. Wilson says it's an embarrassment that the U.S. intelligence community couldn't come to this conclusion on its own. "It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open." He doubts that ElBaradei's announcement was the first time the U.S. had reason to think the documents were fakes. "I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday."
In Wilson's book, The Politics of Truth, he will claim that this appearance prompted the "workup" meeting between top Cheney aides that led to the decision to smear him and the disclosure of his wife's identity.
March 9, 2003
On CBS's Face the Nation, Condoleezza Rice says, "We know from a detainee that...the head of training for Al Qaeda...that they sought help in developing chemical and biological weapons because they weren't doing very well on their own. They sought it in Iraq. They received the help." Libi, the detainee in question, has been doubted by American intelligence since February 2002. All of his intel was obtained under torture, and in 2004 the CIA will recall all intelligence assessments based on his testimony.
March 10, 2003
Frank Miller, an official handpicked by Condoleezza Rice to handle postwar policy issues, briefs national security deputies and the President on postwar plans. Miller assures them that only the top one percent of Baath Party officials will be purged from the government and that deBathification will leave the Iraqi army largely intact. George Packer writes in The Assassin's Gate, "Everyone up to the president approved these eleventh-hour decisions. And yet, somehow, they would never matter in Iraq. They seemed to exist so that, in case anyone ever asked, someone would say, 'Yes, the president was briefed and he signed off.'" Miller adds that it is important that deBaathification doesn't cripple the Iraqi military because the army will be integral to the postwar plan. Coalition forces do not have the manpower to control Iraq nor do the troops understand the political situation in the country.
March 14, 2003
As it becomes increasingly clear that a U.N. resolution justifying the use of force will not pass (Bulgaria is the only country other than the original sponsors to publicly support it), President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar meet in the Portuguese Azores for an "emergency summit." At its conclusion, the three leaders restate their commitment to a March 17 deadline for the U.N. to authorize war. Bush says, "tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world."
March 16, 2003
Cheney appears on Meet the Press. He says, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." On the fact that the IAEA's ElBaradei doubts Saddam Hussein has a nuclear program: "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing."
After saying several times that Saddam is trying to build a nuclear weapons, Cheney says: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Six months later after the beginning of the war, Cheney will claim that he misspoke.
Three days before the bombing of Baghdad begins, 169 members of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance fly to Kuwait. Confusion abounds. No one has an org chart of the Iraqi ministries. USAID contractor Albert Cevallos is asked by Army civil affairs officers: "What's the plan for policing?" Cevallos replies: "I thought you knew the plan. Haven't you talked to ORHA?" "No," they reply, "no one talked to us."Anxious, several members of ORHA - precursor to the Coalition Provisional Authority - draw up a list of sixteen key sites around Baghdad that the military should protect after the fall of the city. The first and second are the central bank and the Iraqi Museum. The last is the Oil Ministry.
Many officials are there because of connections, not expertise. Head of ORHA's civil administration team is Michael Mobbs, a former law partner of Pentagon official and prominent neoconservative Douglas Feith; Mobbs has been appointed at Feith's insistence.
March 17, 2003
With little international support, the U.S., Britain, and Spain officially scrap the quest to obtain a new U.N. resolution on Iraq. Four and a half months have passed since U.N. Resolution 1441, and a new resolution would signal the world's belief that Iraq had failed the terms of that resolution and now faced the consequences. The "coalition of the willing" announces it will enforce the U.N. resolution without the U.N.'s approval.
Bush addresses the nation on the eve of war: "Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it." He gives Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face military action.
"Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near. "
March 18, 2003
A Washington Post article runs, inside the paper on page A13, under the headline, "Bush Clings To Dubious Allegations About Iraq." It reads, in part: "As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged--and in some cases disproved--by the United Nations, European governments, and even US intelligence reports."
March 19, 2003
Operation Iraqi Freedom begins. Coalition forces start striking selected targets in Iraq. President Bush warns a "campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict," but "we will prevail."
March 21, 2003
Shane Childers is the first soldier killed as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is shot when a pickup truck full of armed Iraqis, mistaken for a civilian vehicle, opens fire on an Iraqi oil station. Journalist Michael Gordon, in his book Cobra II, will describe the incident as a perfect illustration of American troops' poor preparation for the Iraq invasion. Instead of engaging armed divisions directly, they face un-uniformed forces, precursors to the Iraqi insurgents, who attack sporadically and frequently on supply lines away from the front lines.
"Shock and Awe" aerial attacks begin.
March 23, 2003
Private First Class Jessica Lynch is injured in an ambush. Iraqis take her to a hospital.
March 26, 2003
ORHA gives the U.S. military a list of 16 sites to secure when Baghdad falls. It is ignored.
March 27, 2003
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz tells Congress that Iraq's oil revenues "could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years... We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
March 30, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deflects criticism that he hasn't deployed enough troops. Of Iraq's purported WMD he says: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
March 31, 2003
NBC fires Peter Arnett for telling Iraqi TV that the Pentagon's war plan had failed. FOX agrees to send Geraldo Rivera home after the Pentagon accuses him of revealing the position of his embed unit on TV.
April 1, 2003
The Red Cross warns the Coalition that its troops are abusing prisoners.
A few weeks after the start of the war, top Libyan officials contact the United States to make overtures about disarmament. Negotiations between Libya and the U.S. have been ongoing for nearly a decade and Libya expressed an interest in getting rid of its weapons programs years earlier, but was told at the time to first complete the payment of reparations to families of the victims of the Lockerbie plane bombing, a Libyan-sponsored terror attack. The fact that the timing of Libya's disarmament coincides with the Iraq War is coincidental, but is later presented to the public as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion.
April 2, 2003
Within hours of recovering Pfc. Jessica Lynch with much fanfare from a hospital it knew to be unguarded, the Pentagon shows film of her "rescue" to reporters. In a typical story, the Washington Post reports Lynch "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds" and was mistreated by hospital staff. Lynch later says her gun jammed before she could fire, she was well treated by hospital staff, but felt used by the military and the media.
April 4, 2003
A Department of Defense report states that the Geneva Convention applies to detainees in Iraq.
April 6, 2003
The Pentagon flies Ahmad Chalabi and 700 followers to southern Iraq. Chalabi is quickly installed in Baghdad's ritzy Hunting Club. An aide warns Gen. Garner that Chalabi's men are acting like "a warlord group." Garner eventually holds a press conference and tells the media that he will not be handing power over to a bunch of exiles. Top DOD official Douglas Feith calls Garner into his office and says: "You don't understand. Chalabi is a great guy; he could be president of Iraq. Don't go and do that." Garner responds: "Look, Doug, either fire me or shut the fuck up." Feith and the Pentagon will do the former.
U.S. forces take Salman Pak military base, where Iraqis supposedly trained hijackers and kept WMDs. Troops turn up no evidence of either.
April 7, 2003
American GIs are photographed relaxing in captured palaces. Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, aka Baghdad Bob, declares: "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected. Iraqis are heroes." Baghdad Bob will become an internet celebrity.
April 8, 2003
U.S. forces fire on Al Jazeera's office in Baghdad, killing a journalist, Tareq Ayoub. In a different attack, U.S. forces fire a shell at the Palestine Hotel, well known for holding foreign journalists. Two are killed.
April 9, 2003
Coalition forces roll into Baghdad almost unopposed. Saddam's statue in Firdos Square is toppled. Media reports the act as a spontaneous celebration by "jubilant" Iraqis. Questions of whether the event was staged by U.S. troops begin the next day.
(In the documentary Control Room, an Al Jazeera journalist notes that the flag-hanging "celebration" hardly looks spontaneous. Indeed, video footage shows a dozen or so Iraqi men of much the same age marching across an otherwise deserted city center, ignored by the U.S. tanks guarding the square, and climbing the statue to hang U.S. and Iraqi flags which they conveniently had on hand. If this were a spontaneous celebration and not a staged event, where are all the women and children and old folks? Hiding from a battle still raging in the city, evidently.)
Looting soon runs rampant. U.S. forces protect only Baghdad airport and the Oil Ministry. Seventeen other ministries are destroyed, 14,000 artifacts are stolen from the Iraqi National Museum, and 341 tons of high explosives are stolen from the Al Qaqaa armory, which will soon be used against U.S. troops.
April 10, 2003
In a televised address, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair assures the Iraqi people, "Saddam gave us no choice [but] to act."
April 11, 2003
U.S. and Kurdish forces take the northern city of Mosul after Iraqi forces lay down their arms. With no security established, the city immediately descends into chaos, with widespread looting, arson and shootings. Rioters burst open the central bank, grabbing money by the fistful. Fights break out between looters fighting for stolen cash. "This is barbaric. This is not Saddam's money. This is the nation's and the people's money," says one Iraqi observer. Mosul University's library, with many rare manuscripts, is ravaged, despite appeals blared from local minarets to stop destroying the city. A market is set on fire. At local hospitals, ambulances and doctors' cars are stolen by force. "There is absolutely no security. The medical staff is scared for their safety. The city has fallen into anarchy," says one staff physician.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says of the widespread looting and rioting, "Think what's happened in our cities when we've had riots, and problems, and looting. Stuff happens! ... Freedom's untidy."
A later Coalition Provisional Authority estimate puts at $12 billion the cost of the looting that went uncontrolled as U.S. troops sat at the Baghdad airport. The New Yorker's George Packer later writes that the cost of the looting canceled out the "projected revenues of Iraq for the first year after the war. The gutted buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, the damaged infrastructure, would continue to haunt almost every aspect of the reconstruction."
CNN reports that a "sense of lawlessness" pervades Baghdad, as "government offices, presidential palaces, homes of former ruling Baath Party officials and other sites, including hospitals" are ravaged. Sporadic small arms fire is heard in the city. Guns and munitions are available for the taking.
U.S. prints 55-card deck of "most wanted" members of Saddam's former regime in Iraq.
April 12, 2003
Foreign journalists become aware that the Iraqi National Museum has been ransacked, with thousands of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts and pieces of artwork missing or destroyed. Museum officials say they struggled in vain to get American troops to guard the building. Science magazine will write: "Scholars are calling last week's looting of Baghdad's Iraq Museum, the chief repository for all archaeological research in the country since 1933, the most severe single blow to cultural heritage in modern history." Some of the stolen pieces will eventually be found and returned.
$2.5 billion per year is allocated for Iraq's reconstruction. The military receives 32 times that.
Jessica Lynch leaves for the U.S.
April 14, 2003
Baghdad's National Library goes up in flames, taking centuries-old manuscripts with it.
April 15, 2003
Iraqi nuclear scientists begin making entreaties to the American military and intelligence agencies, offering to share what they know about Iraq's history with nuclear weapons programs. One even has blueprints and prototype parts buried in his yard. None of the scientists can get any traction; many begin to fear that if they indicate that they have knowledge of Iraq's weapons, they will be detained indefinitely and harshly interrogated. They begin to disperse across the Middle East. With no attention paid to them, some end up in Syria. Others cannot be located to this day. The lack of interest on the part of the American government baffles international observers and weapons experts.
Michael Brown, commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association until he was forced to resign amid scandal in 2001, takes over from Joe Allbaugh, former Bush-Cheney campaign chief, as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Brown's scant qualifications will come under fire as a result of the agency's mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
April 16, 2003
Criticism of Army contracting policy increases after it is revealed that eight contracts worth tens of millions of dollars have all been awarded without competitive bidding.
General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, makes his first trip to Baghdad and informs his commanders that the vision of the administration is that all but one division of American forces will be removed from Iraq by September 2003. There are currently no troops in the Anbar province, the base of the growing Sunni insurgency. Condoleezza Rice tells Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "American forces are still in the Balkans. We're still stuck there. The people in those societies have become dependent on us and on NATO for everything. This is an unhealthy sort of a relationship. The purpose of the American military is not peacekeeping or stability operations. ... We don't want to be stuck in these places for years and years to come. This is not really our responsibility."
Bush signs a $79 billion wartime supplemental budget.
April 17, 2003
USAID awards Bechtel a $680 million limited-bid Iraq reconstruction contract. The few other companies allowed to bid include big-time political contributors like Halliburton, Fluor, and Parsons.
April 18, 2003
Tens of thousands of Iraqis protest the U.S. occupation.
April 19, 2003
A trailer is seized at a Kurdish checkpoint. Bush will later claim it's a mobile weapons lab.
April 23, 2003
April 24, 2003
Donald Rumsfeld tells the Associated Press: "How would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country? The answer is: That ain't gonna happen."
Jay Garner says: "I think you'll begin to see the governmental process start next week. It will have Iraqi faces on it. It will be governed by the Iraqis."
April 28, 2003
U.S. troops fire on demonstrators near Baghdad, killing 13 and wounding 75.
May 1, 2003
After landing in a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, Bush stands on the deck in a flight suit under a banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" and announces "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," adding: "We have removed an ally of Al-Qaeda."
The White House claimed that the "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner was requested by the crew of the ship, who did not have the facilities for producing such a banner, and was intended to refer to the ship's own mission, not the Iraq war. Afterwards, the administration and naval sources stated that the banner was the Navy's idea, White House staff members made the banner, and it was hung by the U.S. Navy personnel. White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN "We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up." According to John Dickerson of TIME magazine, the White House later conceded that they actually hung the banner but still insists it had been done at the request of the crew members. It is later revealed that the two words were in Bush's original speech for that day, but Rumsfeld took them out.
On the day of the speech, the White House says Bush needed to take a jet to the ship because the Lincoln was too far from shore for a helicopter landing. However, the White House later concedes that at the time of the president's visit, the ship was close enough that he could have used a helicopter, rather than making a dramatic "tailhook" landing on the carrier deck.
Warning of the unguarded Al Qaqaa weapons bunker, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, an internal IAEA memorandum cautions that terrorists might be helping ''themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history.'' In October 2004, it is revealed that nearly 380 tons of high explosives have gone missing. The Pentagon replies that with "thousands of tons" of munitions to safeguard around the country, they can only do so much. Though the most egregious example, Al Qaqaa is not an isolated case.
May 6, 2003
The handover of control of Iraq, from Gen. Jay Garner to Paul Bremer, is made public. Garner later says it was because he favored free elections and rejected forced privatization. "We as Americans like to put our template on things. And our template's good for us, but it's not good for everyone else." Garner's OHRA becomes the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). According to Paul Bremer's memoir of his time in Iraq, before leaving for Baghdad Bremer sends Donald Rumsfeld a copy of a RAND report estimating that 500,000 troops would be needed to keep the peace in postwar Iraq. It is a figure three times higher than the number of troops then deployed. "I think you should consider this," Mr. Bremer writes in a cover
George Bush touts the supposed bio-lab trailer found at a Kurdish checkpoint: "I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program. I will leave the details... to the experts."
May 9, 2003
Just over a week after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, Maj. General Paul D. Eaton is ordered to hurry to Baghdad where he is to command an organization to rebuild Iraq's military. He later says: "I would have expected this to have been done well before troops crossed the line of departure. That was my first reaction: 'We're a little late.'" Pentagon officials tell Eaton that rebuilding the army is their fifth priority, behind building up a civil defense corps, the police force, the border forces, and guards for government buildings, power plants, and oil lines. Decrying shoddy equipment and "a revolving door or individual loaned talent that would spend between two and six months," Eaton says he never received even half the 250 men he was promised: "We set out to man, train, and equip an army for a country of 25 million with six men."
Paul Wolfowitz tells Vanity Fair: "The truth is that, for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction."
May 11, 2003
U.N. reports Iraqi agriculture is on the brink of collapse, threatening Iraqis with starvation.
May 12, 2003
New reconstruction chief Paul Bremer arrives in Baghdad, marking the end of Gen. Jay Garner's term, which is widely seen as a failure. A defense official recalls: "Garner was a fall guy for a bad strategy. He was doing exactly what Rummy wanted him to do. It was the strategy that failed."
May 14, 2003
U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that finding WMDs is "not crucially important."
May 15, 2003
The Pentagon's Jim O'Beirne, husband of National Review's Kate O'Beirne, begins vetting Coalition Provisional Authority hires with special attention to their GOP bona fides. Questions asked of job applicants include "Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000?" and "Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror?" At least two people are asked their position on Roe v. Wade. The staff person pegged to head up police and prison planning at the Ministry of Interior is a 25-year-old in his first year out of school. Thomas Hammes, counterinsurgency adviser to the CPA, asks him how big his team is. His response is that it's pretty small, "but we're really tight because we're frat brothers."
BBC describes the Jessica Lynch rescue as "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived," a commando raid orchestrated like a "Hollywood film." The Pentagon responds that BBC report is "void of all facts."An authorized biography of Lynch titled I Am a Soldier, Too and written by Rick Bragg later claims that Lynch was sexually assaulted by her Iraqi captors. It reads, "The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead." Iraqi hospital workers contest the suggestion of sexual assault. Lynch herself remembers no such thing.
May 16, 2003
Paul Bremer issues the first of two deBaathification orders, banning all former members of the Baath Party above a certain rank from holding any position in the new Iraqi government. A huge portion of Iraq's most capable civil servants will be locked out of the reconstruction process.
May 17, 2003
May 18, 2003
The U.S. Justice Department recommends 6,600 police advisers be sent to Iraq. The White House sends one man, former NYC police commissioner Bernie Kerik, given the titles of Interim Minister of Interior of Iraq and Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Presidential Envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.
Kerik, who prepares for his job by watching A&E documentaries on Saddam Hussein, turns out to be an incompetent manager, holding only two staff meetings in his tenure, and leaves amidst failure saying, "I did my own thing."
In Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Kerik is said to be arrogant, incompetent, and undedicated in his position. Kerik is also criticized by George Packer in his book, Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq:
"Kerik spent his time in Baghdad going on raids with South African mercenaries while his house in New Jersey underwent renovation. He went home after just three months, leaving almost nothing behind."
Kerik, later nominated by Bush to act as head of Homeland Security, will eventually pay $200,000 in fines for gifts he accepted while a public official in New York, and ultimately be indicted on federal corruption charges.
May 19, 2003
The final member of the "Lackawanna Six" pleads guilty to supporting terrorism.
May 20, 2003
GOP insider Mike Battles arrives in Baghdad. His firm Custer Battles is soon awarded $100 million in contracts for, among other things, securing the airport for nonexistent flights. He and partner Scott Custer are later sued by ex-employees for defrauding the U.S. government, though the government itself never seeks a prosecution.
The U.S. government raises the nation's terror threat level to orange, saying that the intelligence community believes al Qaeda is entering an "operational period worldwide." Though they have no "credible, specific information" about targets or a method of attack, they warn that terrorists might strike within U.S. borders.
The Pentagon sends a report on Total Information Awareness to Congress in an attempt to reactivate its funding, an effort that involves changing its name to Terrorism Information Awareness.
May 22, 2003
Bush signs an economic stimulus package giving a $100,000 tax deduction to purchasers of gas-guzzling Humvees, allowing the well-to-do to essentially purchase one for free, while a $1,500 deduction for buying fuel-efficient hybrids is allowed to phase out.
Bush signs Executive Order No. 13303, granting immunity to oil companies in Iraq.
May 23, 2003
Bremer issues the second deBaathification order, which disbands the Iraqi army, the intelligence service, the Republican Guard, and the ministries of Defense and Information. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, is stunned by the two orders and later says they created "400,000 new enemies." A few days later, Bremer meets with the Iraqi advisory group Garner had created, telling them, "One thing you need to realize is you're not the government. We are. And we're in charge." The next day, the group goes home.
May 27, 2003
Donald Rumsfeld tells the Council on Foreign Relations, "As Thomas Jefferson put it, 'We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.' ...It took time and patience...before the Founders got it right, so too, it will take time...for the Iraqi people.... Because of the speed...and the execution of the war plan...the vast majority of those oil fields were not destroyed...the infrastructure of the country is largely intact, and the coalition took great care to protect the lives of innocent civilians as well as the important holy sites."
May 28, 2003
The CIA reports publicly that a seized Iraqi trailer is a bioweapons lab. The claim is based heavily on Iraqi defector Curveball's "assessment" of photos relayed to Germany. Only one of 15 intelligence analysts buys the conclusion. A few months later, a British WMD expert inspects the trailer and reports, "The equipment was singularly inappropriate.... You'd have better luck putting a couple of dustbins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there."
May 29, 2003
Andrew Gilligan sparks a cataclysmic row between the government and the BBC when he reports allegations that Downing Street had ordered an intelligence dossier on Iraq weapons of mass destruction to be "sexed up".
May 30, 2003
British Prime Minister Tony Blair denies that WMD intelligence was distorted or exaggerated.
Photos emerge of British soldiers torturing POWs. One shows a man gagged, bound, and dangling in a net from a forklift.
June 1, 2003
The CIA creates the Iraq Survey Group to conduct a methodical search for WMD in Iraq. Scientist David Kay is appointed to lead.
June 2, 2003
1,000 Iraqi soldiers protest the disbanding of the army outside CPA headquarters. Ministry of Defense members state that they will resort to suicide attacks if their complaints are left unaddressed. Days later, Bush and Bremer meet in Qatar. Bremer tells the President, "Our most urgent problem is unemployment."
Paul Bremer approves the Justice Department's plan for policing Iraq. Although DynCorp International, the private company slated to hire police advisers, rounds up 1,150 retired and active officers eager to serve, only 50 make it to Iraq in the following six months. Deeming the civilian effort a failure, the military takes over policing policy in Iraq in 2004. In defense of this situation, the White House and the Pentagon say that it would have been impossible to find thousands of qualified advisers willing to go to Iraq.
Rumsfeld brings Gen. Jay Garner, whom he has just fired, on a visit to the White House to meet with the president. Not once does Bush ask Garner about the state of Iraq, though the meeting lasted for almost an hour. But at the end of the meeting, Bush asks Garner "jokingly," "You want to do Iran for the next one?" To which Garner replies, "No, sir, me and the boys are holding out for Cuba."
June 4, 2003
Tony Blair rejects calls for an independent judicial inquiry into case for the Iraq war.
June 5, 2003
The Washington Post reports, "Former and current intelligence officials said they felt a continual drumbeat, not only from Cheney and Libby, but also from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Feith, and less so from CIA Director George J. Tenet, to find information or write reports in a way that would help the administration make the case that going into Iraq was urgent. 'They were the browbeaters,' said a former defense intelligence official who attended some of the meetings in which Wolfowitz and others pressed for a different approach to the assessments they were receiving. 'In interagency meetings,' he said, 'Wolfowitz treated the analysts' work with contempt.'"
U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix on suspected Iraqi WMD sites: "In none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say. I thought, my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"
June 6, 2003
Donald Rumsfeld tells the media, "In those regions where pockets of dead-enders are trying to reconstitute, Gen. Franks and his team are rooting them out. In short, the coalition is making good progress."
June 9, 2003
In a retrospective of pre-war intelligence, Newsweek reports that the aluminum tube claims were doubted early on within the intelligence community: "At the CIA, Tenet seems to have latched on to the tubes as a kind of smoking gun. He brought one of the tubes to a closed Senate hearing that same month. But from the beginning, other intelligence experts in the government had their doubts. After canvassing experts at the nation's nuclear labs, the Department of Energy concluded that the tubes were the wrong specification to be used in a centrifuge, the equipment used to enrich uranium. The State Department's INR [intelligence arm] concluded that the tubes were meant to be used for a multiple-rocket-launching system. (And Saddam was not secretly buying them; the purchase order was posted on the Internet.) In two reports to Powell, INR concluded there was no reliable evidence that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program at all. 'These were not weaselly worded,' said [Greg] Thielmann [formerly of the State Department]. 'They were as definitive as these things go.' These dissents were duly recorded in a classified intelligence estimate. But they were largely dropped from the declassified version made available to the public."
June 10, 2003
Hans Blix lashes out at the "bastards" in Washington who smeared him.
June 12, 2003
Bush Administration announces that it will propose changes to Roadless Rule to exempt Tongass and Chugach National Forests and grant waivers upon request of individual State governors.
June 13, 2003
Almost 100 Iraqis are killed in two bloody attacks. The Guardian reports on a survey indicating that 10,000 Iraqi civilians might have died in the war to date.
Mid-June 2003
An unnamed administration official,later revealed to be Colin Powell's deputy Richard Armitage, tells Bob Woodward that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, works for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction, making him, in all likelihood, the first leakee.
June 16, 2003
In a speech to small business owners in New Jersey, President Bush says: "Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted."
June 17, 2003
CIA analysts write to George Tenet and retract their Niger uranium reporting. "Since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad."
June 18, 2003
Former head of reconstruction in Iraq, Gen. Jay Garner tells Rumsfeld in a private meeting that the U.S. has made "three tragic decisions" and that disbanding the army was the worst of the three. Garner assures Rumsfeld that there is "still time to rectify" the situation. Rumsfeld responds, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are." Garner meets with Bush later that day and says nothing of these tragic errors.
June 21, 2003
Bush addresses disquiet over U.S. troop deaths. One in three have been killed since end of "major combat operations." As many as 7,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since invasion began.
June 24, 2003
Bush calls for more oil and gas drilling on public lands.
June 26, 2003
Nearly a decade after Republicans launched a campaign to oust Democrats from top lobbying jobs in Washington, sometimes through intimidation and private threats, they are seizing a significant number of the most influential positions at trade associations and corporate government affairs offices -- and reaping big financial rewards, the Washington Post reports.
Partly because of the "K Street Project" -- and partly because of GOP control of Congress and the presidency -- virtually every major company or trade association looking for new top-level representation is hiring or seeking to hire a prominent Republican politician or staffer, according to Republicans and Democrats tracking the situation.
Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) once held up a House vote on legislation to protest the decision of a trade association to hire a Democrat for a top position.
This year, General Electric, Comcast, Citigroup and many other Fortune 500 companies have hired Bush administration officials and former GOP congressional advisers for top lobbying posts. A Republican National Committee official recently told a group of GOP lobbyists that 33 of 36 top-level Washington positions he is monitoring went to Republicans, according to someone who attended the meeting.
Late June, 2003
U.S. Army reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is put in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade with jurisdiction over military prisons in Iraq. It is her first experience dealing with prisoners. Her command includes three large jails (including Abu Ghraib), eight battalions, and 3,400 army reservists. Most have no training in handling prisoners. Karpinski will come under fire for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and eventually lose her rank, but she will in turn become an outspokencritic of the U.S. military leadership in Iraq, accusing superiors of making her the scapegoat for the scandal.
July 1, 2003
The Washington Monthly reports on the K Street Project, and in particular on Sen. Rick Santorum's Tuesday project meetings: "Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. 'The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing,' says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. 'It's been a very successful effort.'"
July 2, 2003
Asked about the situation in Iraq, Bush tells a news conference: "There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring 'em on."
July 6, 2003
The New York Times publishes Joseph Wilson's "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which the former diplomat recounts his mission to Niger, and how he reported to CIA and State Department officials early in 2002...nearly a year before Bush made the claim in his State of the Union address...how he found no truth to the rumors that Iraq had sought yellow-cake uranium from Niger. In fact, the U.S. Ambassador to Niger told him she had already debunked this rumor in her reports to Washington.
July 14, 2003
Columnist Robert Novak's "Mission to Niger" includes the passage:
"Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counterproliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him."
Novak seems unaware that Valerie Plame is a covert operative for the CIA. Revealing the identity of a covert agent is a federal offense.
July 15, 2003
President Bush says he had "darn good intelligence" on Iraq despite his disputed State of the Union claim that Baghdad sought to purchase uranium from Africa.
"The larger point is and the fundamental question is, 'Did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program?' And the answer is, 'Absolutely,' " Bush tells reporters after a meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
August 4, 2003
August 25, 2003
Abu Ghraib reopens as U.S.-run prison. Troops replace Saddam's portrait with slogan "America is a friend of all Iraqi people."
August 31, 2003
Angry with what he considers poor intelligence coming out of Iraq, Rumsfeld orders Guantanamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to go to Iraq and "Gitmoize" detention and interrogation operations there.
September 2, 2003
Paul Bremer says, "The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over."
September 11, 2003
September 14, 2003
September 16, 2003
September 17, 2003
October 1, 2003
MPs from the 372nd Company arrive to guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Spc. Joseph Darby later tells GQ he "saw like fifteen prisoners sitting in their cells in women's underwear.... This stuff was going on before we arrived. After we took over, it basically just escalated."
The Atlantic cover story condones the Bush administration's interrogation program.
Insurgents launch Ramadan Offensive.
October 8, 2003
October 20, 2003
Spc. Sabrina Harman, an MP with the 372nd, writes her girlfriend, describing the brutalities of sleep deprivation, stress positions, and interrogation. "Not many people know this shit goes on," she says. "I don't know if I can take it mentally, what if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future Terrorists."
October 24, 2003
MP Cpl. Charles Graner attaches leash to naked detainee and has his girlfriend, Pfc. Lynndie England, pose for photographs holding it. "I assumed it was okay, because he was an MP, he had the background as a corrections officer, he was older than me. I didn't question it," she later testifies.
November 3, 2003
November 4, 2003
November 5, 2003
Computer voting machines in Boone County, Indiana, somehow record 144,000 votes cast in a country where only 19,000 registered voters live. When corrected, it turned out a mere 5,352 ballots had actually been cast.
"Everyone here uses Ambien," gushes Secretary of State Colin Powell.
November 7, 2003
Abu Ghraib prisoners stacked into naked pyramid, made to masturbate and simulate fellatio. "A present for your birthday," Graner tells England, who is turning 21.
November 19, 2003
Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th MI Brigade, is designated commander of Abu Ghraib base, further blurring the lines of authority between Military Police and Military Intelligence.
November 20, 2003
On Gen. Miller's advice, dog teams arrive at Abu Ghraib.
December 4, 2003
MP, MI, and military legal personnel gather to discuss critical Red Cross report on Abu Ghraib.
Capt. Carolyn Wood leaves Abu Ghraib on emergency leave and never returns.
December 8, 2003
The Justice Department says it will investigate reports that Republican Congressional leaders attempted to bribe Republican Congressman Nick Smith of Missouri on the floor on Congress last month in order to win his vote to overhaul Medicare. Smith held out in supporting the Medicare until the last hour. Last week Smith repeatedly said he was bribed and threatened but now as an investigation seems imminent he now claims he wasn’t. In a November 23 newspaper column he wrote “Bribes and special deals were offered to convince members to vote yes.” Then Smith, who is preparing to retire, said in a radio interview that Republican leaders promised to give $100,000 to his son’s campaign for his seat.
December 13, 2003
Saddam Hussein captured in "spider hole" near Tikrit.
December 15, 2003
December 24, 2003
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski signs a letter to the Red Cross, prepared by military lawyers, that "tends to gloss over" abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib, according to later investigation by Maj. Gen. George Fay. Military leadership ignores Red Cross recommendations.