Bush and the White House contradict each other all in one day. They can't get their stories straight.......O'Neill was right.
ted
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Bush disputes O'Neill's account of Iraq planning
Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times
Published January 13, 2004 TREA13
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul O'Neill, his former Treasury secretary, that the White House was looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the very beginning of his administration.
And the Treasury Department said it was opening an inspector general's inquiry into how an apparently classified document about Iraq came into the possession of Ron Suskind.
He is the author of "The Price of Loyalty" who showed the cover sheet of the document marked "secret" during an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday.
Suskind, who was given access by O'Neill to 19,000 documents that were turned over to him by the Treasury Department after his resignation, said the inquiry would find that the transfer of documents was "entirely appropriate."
CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said: "We don't have a secret document. We didn't show a secret document. We merely showed a cover sheet that alluded to such a document."
Responding to an account provided by O'Neill in the book, being published today, Bush said that he worked on how to implement a national policy that he inherited of promoting a change of government in Iraq. But he said his focus at the time was on reevaluating the ways in which the United States and Britain were enforcing the "no-flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq.
"And no, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear," Bush said at a news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, when asked whether he had begun planning within days of his inauguration for an invasion of Iraq. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."
While the White House also did contingency planning for handling any threat that Iraq might pose, administration officials said, it was not looking for pretexts to mount a military campaign, as O'Neill suggested in the book. "It's laughable to suggest that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq that shortly after coming to office," one official said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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