“President Bush chaired two more meetings of the NSC [National Security Council] on September 12 [2001]. In the first meeting, he stressed that the United States was at war with a new and different kind of enemy. The President asked principals to go beyond their pre-9/11 work and develop a strategy to eliminate terrorists and punish those who support them…They considered a paper that went beyond al Qaeda to propose ‘the elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life,’ an aim that would include pursuing other international terrorist organizations in the Middle East.”
– 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report, Pages 330-331