Sunday, January 11, 2004

More O'Neill:

Report: Bush Planned Iraqi Invasion Before Sept. 11

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges in a new book that President Bush (news - web sites) entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq (news - web sites) and was in search of a way to go about it.

O'Neill, who was fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush's economic team, has become the first major Bush administration insider to launch an attack on the president.

He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty."

To go to war, Bush used the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had to be stopped in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. The weapons have never been found.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said in the "60 Minutes" interview scheduled to air on Sunday. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."More at link


You must watch 60 Minutes this evening. That's an order! (well, not really an order..more of a heads up)

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