The meeting on which the DSM were based occurred in July, 2002 ... they clearly show that bush and the neo-cons had an agenda to invade Iraq whether they had evidence or not ... "the facts were being fixed around the policy" ...
And there is evidence going back much further than that that the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq ... but evidence cited in the article below, not new evidence, seems to be even more incriminating ... it shows that Rumsfeld's immediate reaction to the 9/11 attacks was to question whether it could be used to justify an attack against Saddam ... this was further confirmed in Richard Clarke's book ...
Interestingly, the article's primary focus was on the "commission of errors" made by the 9/11 Commission ... in choosing between labeling LIHOP/MIHOP as reality versus conspiracy theory, one can freely debate whether the specific evidence provides adequate justification to decide one way or the other ... but when information is clearly covered up on a wide-scale, when obvious leads are not even pursued, when the integrity of people like Senator Bob Graham or Sibel Edmonds does not provide sufficient basis to investigate further, something is clearly wrong ... i am not an expert on the specific allegations used to support LIHOP or MIHOP ... but on the strength of what clearly appears to be a massive whitewash, i'm am strongly inclined to believe 9/11 was either a LIHOP or a MIHOP ...
The following article appears in this week's "Village Voice". The "leaked notes" referenced in the article refer to notes describing conversations that occurred hours after the 9/11 incidents ... btw, I have not included sections that relate to the "errors of commission" made by the 9/11 Commission.
source:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0534,mondo1,67096,6.htmlAs reported by CBS News, based on leaked notes from a National Military Command Center teleconference, the Secretary of Defense was surprisingly reluctant to make much of the call:
"Rumsfeld felt it was 'vague,' that it 'might not mean something,' and that there was 'no good basis for hanging hat.' In other words, the evidence was not clear-cut enough to justify military action against Bin Laden. But later that afternoon, the CIA reported the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected Al Qaeda operatives."
According to the notes, Rumsfeld learned that "one guy is associate of bomber"—the Al Qaeda suicide bomber who attacked the U.S. warship in Yemen in 2000.
At 2:40, the notes report, Rumsfeld was beginning to take aim at the target close to his heart: He wants the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL . Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." This was the first indication that Rumsfeld was disregarding specific intelligence clearly linking the attack to Al Qaeda and instead had begun to fantasize about getting Saddam Hussein.Hours later, White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke went to the White House for meetings that Clarke believed would concern U.S. vulnerabilities, possible future attacks, and what might be done to prevent them. As he writes in one of the most famous passages from his book, Clarke "instead walked into a series of discussions about Iraq."
"At first," Clarke writes,
"I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002."