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10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/George W. Bush.md
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@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ George W. Bush attended [[Yale University]] (B.A. 1968) and [[Harvard]] Business
The September 11, 2001 attacks, in which [[al-Qaeda]] operatives hijacked four commercial aircraft and killed approximately 2,977 people, defined the Bush presidency. Within weeks of the attacks, Bush authorized the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] to build a global counterterrorism infrastructure including the detention and interrogation program that would become the source of the most serious legal controversies of his administration.
The decision to invade [[Iraq]] in March 2003 was based on intelligence assessments that [[Saddam Hussein]] possessed weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical, and potentially nuclear). The intelligence case was built around the testimony of an Iraqi defector codenamed "[[Curveball]]" ([[Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi]]), whose claims of mobile biological weapons laboratories were assessed by the [[BND]] and passed to the [[CIA]], despite significant internal doubts about his reliability. The CIA's finished assessments - the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD programs - overstated certainty about Iraqi WMD capabilities in ways that subsequent investigations attributed to politicized pressure from the Office of the Vice President ([[Dick Cheney]]) and the Office of Special Plans established under Undersecretary of Defense [[Douglas Feith]].
The decision to invade [[Iraq]] in March 2003 was based on intelligence assessments that [[Saddam Hussein]] possessed weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical, and potentially nuclear). The intelligence case was built around the testimony of an Iraqi defector codenamed "[[Curveball]]" ([[Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi]]), whose claims of mobile biological weapons laboratories were assessed by the [[BND]] and passed to the [[CIA]], despite significant internal doubts about his reliability. The CIA's finished assessments - the October 2002 [[National Intelligence Estimate]] on Iraq's WMD programs - overstated certainty about Iraqi WMD capabilities in ways that subsequent investigations attributed to politicized pressure from the Office of the Vice President ([[Dick Cheney]]) and the Office of Special Plans established under Undersecretary of Defense [[Douglas Feith]].
No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq following the invasion. The Iraq Survey Group's final report (September 2004) concluded that Saddam Hussein's WMD programs had effectively ended in the early 1990s and that intelligence assessments had been fundamentally wrong.[^1]
@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq following the invasion. The Ir
Following the capture of al-Qaeda operatives beginning in 2002, the CIA requested and received legal authorization from the [[Department of Justice]]'s [[Office of Legal Counsel]] (OLC) for a program of "[[enhanced interrogation techniques]]" that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, stress positions, and other methods that the U.S. government had previously characterized as torture when used by other states. The OLC memos authorizing these techniques (the "[[Torture Memos]]," authored primarily by [[John Yoo]] and [[Jay Bybee]]) redefined the legal standard for torture in ways that senior legal scholars and international law experts subsequently condemned as bad-faith legal analysis.
The CIA operated a network of "black sites" - secret detention facilities in countries including [[Poland]], [[Romania]], [[Thailand]], and [[Afghanistan]] - outside normal legal accountability. Approximately 100 detainees were held in the black site network; a smaller number, including [[Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]], were subjected to waterboarding and the full enhanced interrogation program. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, released in summary form in December 2014 after years of controversy, concluded that the program produced little to no actionable intelligence not available through other means and that the CIA had systematically misled Congress, the White House, and the public about its effectiveness.[^2]
The CIA operated a network of "black sites" - secret detention facilities in countries including [[Poland]], [[Romania]], [[Thailand]], and [[Afghanistan]] - outside normal legal accountability. Approximately 100 detainees were held in the black site network; a smaller number, including [[Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]], were subjected to waterboarding and the full enhanced interrogation program. The [[Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]]'s study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, released in summary form in December 2014 after years of controversy, concluded that the program produced little to no actionable intelligence not available through other means and that the CIA had systematically misled Congress, the [[White House]], and the public about its effectiveness.[^2]
### NSA Warrantless Surveillance