“Among those who have revealed the early planning of the [Iraq] war are Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first treasury secretary and an official member of the Cheney Energy Task Force. According to O’Neill, regime change in Iraq was the number one item on the agenda at the very first Bush administration National Security Council meeting […]
1/30/2001
Deputy Secretary of the Interior Stephen “Griles was a lead actor in the Cheney Energy Task Force [that first convened on January 30, 2001], serving as the Interior Department’s chief representative. As such, he played a lead role in mapping out the U.S. oil industry’s interests in Iraq’s oil fields and developing some of the […]
1/30/2001
“It was little wonder that during his first National Security Council meeting [on January 30, 2001], when the only topics on the agenda were Israel and Iraq, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill thought that all the issues had already been decided. ‘The meeting had seemed scripted,’ he thought. …[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld had said little, […]
1/30/2001
“Seeing little reason, or intelligence justification, for war at the close of the inaugural National Security Council meeting [on January 30, 2001], Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was perplexed. ‘Who, exactly, was pushing this foreign policy?’ he wondered to himself. And ‘why Saddam, why now, and why [was] this central to U.S. interests?’ ” – James […]
1/30/2001
After President Bush’s January 30, 2001, National Security Council meeting, “Treasury Secretary [Paul] O’Neill was convinced that ‘getting Hussein was now the administration’s focus, that much was already clear.’ But O’Neill believed, the real destabilizing factor in the Middle East was not Saddam Hussein but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict–the issue Bush had just turned his back […]
1/30/2001
On January 30, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed the sole items on the agenda for his first high-level national security team meeting: “three key objectives: Get rid of Saddam Hussein, end American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and rearrange the dominoes in the Middle East. …The centerpiece of their recommendations was the removal […]
1/30/2001
In the National Security Council’s first meeting after President Bush entered the White House, “Advocating ‘going after Saddam’ during the January 30 [2001] meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to [Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill, ‘Imagine what the [Middle East] region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with U.S. interests. […]
1/30/2001
In Ron Suskind’s book The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said “the [Bush] administration had begun planning the overthrow of Saddam Hussein at its first, postinaugurational National Security Council [NSC] meeting in January [30] 2001–rather than in the more deliberative, post-9/11 evidentiary process it had advertised.” – Ron Suskind, The One Percent […]
1/30/2001
“The primary focus…[of the Bush Administration]–as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice framed it in January [30] 2001 at the first NSC [National Security Council] meeting of the Bush presidency–was on ‘how Iraq is destabilizing the region,’ and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.’ ” – Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, Page 22 […]
1/25/2001
On January 25, 2001, counterterrorism czar Richard “Clarke sent National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice a memo arguing, ‘We urgently need a Principals’ level review of the al Qida network. We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses.’ No such meeting was held until months later, and there, too, no […]