New Documents: Bush Team Planned Iraq War from Start

Posted by AFP on @ 10:16 am

Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy

URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/09/23/new-documents-reveal-bush-team-planned-iraq-war-from-start/

Former president George W. Bush’s advisers focused on toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime as soon as he took office and discussed how to justify a war in Iraq shortly after invading Afghanistan in 2001, official documents showed Wednesday.
A few hours after the September 11 attacks in 2001, then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of attacking Iraq as well as Osama bin Laden, according to notes of a meeting on that day, newly declassified papers show.
Rumsfeld told a Pentagon lawyer to go to his deputy to get “support” showing a supposed link between the Iraqi regime and Al-Qaeda’s founder, according to the papers posted by the Washington-based National Security Archive, an independent research institute.

The US government has since acknowledged that Saddam’s regime had no role in the 9/11 attacks.

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