The Iran–Contra affair, often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal and more rarely as the Iran Initiative, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the illegal sale of arms to Iran, which was subject to an arms embargo at the time. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, an anti-Sandinista rebel group in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by legislative appropriations was prohibited by Congress, but the Reagan administration figured out a loophole by secretively using non-appropriated funds instead.
The Iraqi National Congress is an Iraqi political party that was led by Ahmed Chalabi who died in 2015. It was formed as an umbrella opposition group with the aid and direction of the United States' government following the Persian Gulf War, for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of longtime Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
George W. Bush's tenure as the 43rd president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2001, and ended on January 20, 2009. Bush, a Republican from Texas, took office following his narrow Electoral College victory over Democratic incumbent vice president Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, in which he lost the popular vote to Gore by 543,895 votes. Four years later, in the 2004 presidential election, he narrowly defeated Democrat nominee John Kerry, to win re-election and winning the popular vote. Bush served two terms and was succeeded by Democrat Barack Obama, who won the 2008 presidential election. He is the eldest son of the 41st president, George H. W. Bush.
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Richard Norman Perle is an American political advisor who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. He began his political career as a senior staff member to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. He served on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004 where he served as chairman from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush administration before resigning due to conflict of interests.
George John Tenet is an American intelligence official and academic who served as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, as well as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
The history of the United States from 1980 until 1991 includes the last year of the Jimmy Carter presidency, eight years of the Ronald Reagan administration, and the first three years of the George H. W. Bush presidency, up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plagued by the Iran hostage crisis, runaway inflation, and mounting domestic opposition, Carter lost the 1980 United States presidential election to Republican Reagan.
Seymour Myron Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat. In 2018, he was a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Prior to this appointment, he served as a research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, United States Deputy Secretary of State (2007–2009), and the first ever Director of National Intelligence (2005–2007).
The director of central intelligence (DCI) was the head of the American Central Intelligence Agency from 1946 to 2004, acting as the principal intelligence advisor to the president of the United States and the United States National Security Council, as well as the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various US intelligence agencies.
Ronald Ian "Ron" Spiers was an American diplomat who served as an Ambassador to several countries during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI, which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq by attempting to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction.
The Salman Pak, or al-Salman, facility is an Iraqi military facility near Baghdad. It was falsely assessed by United States military intelligence to be a key center of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programs. The facility came under American control in early April 2003 when it was captured by U.S. Marines. The facility was then referred to as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Carpenter.
Robert G. Joseph is a senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy. He was the United States Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation, with ambassadorial rank. Prior to this post, Joseph was the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, a position he held until January 24, 2007. Joseph is known for being instrumental in creating the Proliferation Security Initiative and as the architect of the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. He was also the US chief negotiator to Libya in 2003 who convinced the Libyans to give up their WMD programs. He also recently authored a book describing his experience in negotiating with Libya entitled "Countering WMD."
Richard Barlow is an American intelligence analyst and a former expert in nuclear non-proliferation for the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. He lost his job and was subjected to a campaign of persecution and intimidation after he expressed concern to his managers in the US Department of Defense over testimony to congress that he believed to be false about Pakistan's nuclear weapon program during the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Since then, he has had occasional contract work for various federal agencies including the CIA, the State Department, the FBI and Sandia National Laboratories. In 2013 he had been unemployed since 2004 when his job at Sandia had been eliminated. "If they had busted those [Pakistani] networks," he told journalist Jeff Stein, "Iran would have no nuclear program, North Korea wouldn't have a uranium bomb, and Pakistan wouldn't have over a hundred nuclear weapons they are driving around in vans to hide from us."
There are various rationales for the Iraq War that have been used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent hostilities.
Ari Ben-Menashe is an Israeli-Canadian businessman, security consultant, and author. He was previously an employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate from 1977 to 1987, and an arms dealer. He lives in Montreal.
The State of Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. Estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, and the country is believed to possess the ability to deliver them in several methods, including by aircraft, as submarine-launched cruise missiles, and via the Jericho series of intermediate to intercontinental range ballistic missiles. Its first deliverable nuclear weapon is thought to have been completed in late 1966 or early 1967; which would make it the sixth country in the world to have developed them.
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy is a 1991 book by Seymour Hersh. It details the history of Israel's nuclear weapons program and its effects on Israel-American relations. The "Samson Option" of the book's title refers to the nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson is said to have pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated.
The cruise missiles strike on Iraq in June 1993 were ordered by U.S. President Bill Clinton as both a retaliation and a warning triggered by the attempted assassination by alleged Iraqi intelligence agents of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush while on a visit to Kuwait from 14–16 April 1993.
