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Context of 'June 9, 2003: White House: WMD Claim ‘Still Stands,’ but Iraq War Justified because Iraqi People Now Free of ‘Tyranny’'This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event June 9, 2003: White House: WMD Claim ‘Still Stands,’ but Iraq War Justified because Iraqi People Now Free of ‘Tyranny’. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be. During the daily press “gaggle,” Ari Fleischer acknowledges there is no evidence that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks. A reporter asks if there is “still no evidence of a connection between Iraq and 9/11?” to which Fleischer responds, “That’s correct.” [White House, 9/26/2002] White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer asserts during his daily press briefing, “We know for a fact that there are weapons there.” [White House, 1/9/2003] White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says during his daily press briefing, “Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly. This was the reason that the president felt so strongly that we needed to take military action to disarm Saddam Hussein, since he would not do it himself.” [White House, 3/21/2003] Entity Tags: George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer Timeline Tags: Events Leading to Iraq Invasion, Iraq under US Occupation  White House press secretary Ari Fleischer is asked if the administration feels “some awkwardness” over the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq. Fleischer responds: “No. We know Saddam Hussein is there, but we haven’t found him yet, either. The fact of the matter is we are still in a war, and not everything about the war is yet known. But make no mistake—as I said earlier—we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.” [White House, 4/10/2003] Entity Tags: Ari Fleischer, Bush administration, Saddam Hussein Timeline Tags: Iraq under US Occupation Journalist Russell Mokhiber asks White House press secretary Ari Fleischer: “You said in April that the war was about weapons of mass destruction (see April 10, 2003). The war resulted in thousands of innocent civilian deaths.… Do you personally feel any remorse given the public case that is being made that this war was based on that false pretext?” Fleischer responds with an assertion about Iraq being safer because of the removal of a brutal tyrant: “Number one, you have no basis to say that it is a false pretext. Number two, when you take a look at the mass graves that have been discovered all around Iraq, I think that world breathes a sign of relief that the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, with no regard to human rights, was removed from power so that the Iraqi people can at long last have a life to build a future that is based on freedom and opportunity and not on tyranny.” Mokhiber redirects Fleischer back onto the topic of WMD, noting, “But you said the war was based on weapons of mass destruction.” Fleischer says, “That still stands, per earlier in the conversation.” [US Department of State, 6/9/2003; CommonDreams, 6/9/2003] | Email UpdatesReceive weekly email updates summarizing what contributors have added to the History Commons database DonateDeveloping and maintaining this site is very labor intensive. If you find it useful, please give us a hand and donate what you can. VolunteerIf you would like to help us with this effort, please contact us. We need help with programming (Java, JDO, mysql, and xml), design, networking, and publicity. If you want to contribute information to this site, click the register link at the top of the page, and start contributing. | |||||||
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