Nope, O’Neill hasn’t denied “everything put forth in this debate”
He’s sticking by the bit about Bush using the meeting to direct the pentagon to make plans for a ground invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps a few Americans read more into O’neill’s words than was intended, just as some immediately dismissed them as “Bush-Bashing.” There’s still a great deal of meat in O’neill’s claims, and, for the good of the country, they deserve a thorough examination.
Can you provide a cite for this? I don’t mean to be petty, but I did not find evidence of this in the CNN article emacknight linked to.
I agree that this matter needs to be looked into. But we need far more than meetings about Iraq in the early Bush administration. We need some sort of drastic and nefarious change before 9/11 to prove bad intentions. To my mind it would have been criminally negligent NOT to discuss Iraq alot early on in his administration. Remember, we had troops there being shot at. We also had discussed various foriegn interventions during the campaign. I don’t think it would have been out of line for Bush to investigate alternatives in Iraq.
Did anyone find any evidence that Bush or anyone else had motives other than the national ones? That is, did anyone discover a memo to the effect, “Haliburton is not profitable enough this quarter. Let’s see if we can find them some more resources.”?
Has anyone read O’Neill’s book? Does he claim more than a few early meetings as evidence for disengenuous intentions in Iraq?