Apart from Hebrang, the adoption of the declaration was also initiated by independent deputy Slaven letica, but in negotiations about the text they abandoned the original idea to declare Storm Operation an international ally anti-terrorist operation.
The draft declaration, which Hebrang and Letica showed to parliamentary parties earlier this week, said that Storm Operation formally gained an international character with the signing of the Split Agreement (Tudjman-Izetbegovic, on 22 July 1995), but that in fact it had an international character even before that. "Representatives of many countries took part in the intelligence, strategic, operational and diplomatic preparation and realisation of Storm Operation, and the Croatian people own a special gratitude to the Bill Clinton Administration and NATO forces which played the crucial role in the final breaking of the greater Serbian aggression," the original version of the document said.
Another HDZ deputy, Kresimir Cosic, who took part in the preparations for Operation Storm as an assistant to the then Defence Minister Gojko Susak, was upset with this version of the declaration. Cosic said that declaring the United States a participant in Operation Storm was bending the truth about security and political circumstances of that time.