'You are LIEing. There, how does that work for you?"
Ho Hum, so many lies from folks like you, so little time.
I'll give you credit for blatantly deceitful editing
though......
From the 9/11 Commission Report.
Page 335 - Bush did not accept that Iraq was an immediate priority.
Secretary Powell recalled that Wolfowitz—not Rumsfeld—
argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the
terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.66
Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his
belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. “Paul was always of the
view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with,”
Powell told us. “And he saw this as one way of using this
event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem.” Powell said
that President Bush did not give Wolfowitz’s argument
“much weight.”67 Though continuing to worry about Iraq in
the following week, Powell said, President Bush saw
Afghanistan as the priority.
Page 335 - Bush decides Iraq is off the table, barring new information.
President Bush told Bob Woodward that the decision not to invade Iraq was made at the morning session on September 15. Iraq was not even on the table during the September 15 afternoon session, which dealt solely with Afghanistan.69 Rice said that when President Bush called her on Sunday, September 16, he said the focus would be on Afghanistan, although he still wanted plans for Iraq should the country take some action or the administration eventually determine that it had been involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Page 335 - A WoT Phase Two could include Iraq, if necessary.
At the September 17 NSC meeting, there was some further discussion of “phase two” of the war on terrorism.71 President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields.
Page 335 - Wolfowitz continues to push for Iraq.
Within the Pentagon, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz continued to press the case for dealing with Iraq. Writing to Rumsfeld on September 17 in a memo headlined “Preventing More Events,” he argued that if there was even a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat. Wolfowitz contended that the odds were “far more” than 1 in 10, citing Saddam’s praise for the attack, his long record of involvement in terrorism, and theories that Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi agent and Iraq was behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.73 The next day, Wolfowitz renewed the argument, writing to Rumsfeld about the interest of Yousef ’s co-conspirator in the 1995 Manila air plot in crashing an explosives-laden plane into CIA headquarters, and about information from a foreign government regarding Iraqis’ involvement in the attempted hijacking of a Gulf Air flight. Given this background, he wondered why so little thought had been devoted to the danger of suicide pilots, seeing a failure of imagination” and a mind-set that dismissed possibilities.
Page 336 - Blair asks about Iraq; Bush tells him Iraq is not the immediate problem.
On September 20, President Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the two leaders discussed the global conflict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq, the President replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the decisions.
Page 336 - CENTCOM/General Franks wanted to plan for possible movement against Iraq. Bush rejected it.
Franks told us that he was pushing independently to do more robust plan ning on military responses in Iraq during the summer before 9/11—a request President Bush denied, arguing that the time was not right. (CENTCOM also began dusting off plans for a full invasion of Iraq during this period, Franks said.) The CENTCOM commander told us he renewed his appeal for further military planning to respond to Iraqi moves shortly after 9/11, both because he personally felt that Iraq and al Qaeda might be engaged in some form of collusion and because he worried that Saddam might take advantage of the attacks to move against his internal enemies in the northern or southern parts of Iraq, where the United States was flying regular missions to enforce Iraqi no-fly zones. Franks said that President Bush again turned down the request.
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