Jeb Bush’s claim that Islamic State ‘didn’t exist when my brother was president’
In The News Piece in The Washington Post
May 27, 2015
As analyst Brian Fishman noted in a 2006 report for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the announcement was made on Oct. 15, 2006 — more than two years before Bush left office. (This paper, interestingly, was one of the reports that Osama bin Laden had on his bookshelf when he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.) “Unfortunately, almost everyone in Washington, including those of us that understood and emphasized the political shifts it had made, continued to use ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ as shorthand for the group because it was widely understood nomenclature among policymakers,” said Fishman, who is now with the New America Foundation. “This was a mistake; I certainly regret conceding to convenience at the time.”