O'Neill: War Plan Early, Not Wrong

Fmr. Treasury Sec. Softens Comments About His Former Boss

(CBS/AP)  Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Tuesday said he did not mean to imply that the Bush administration was wrong to begin contingency planning for a regime change in Iraq, but was surprised that it was at the top of the agenda at the first Cabinet meeting.

After word that the Treasury Department that it was launching an inspector general's investigation into how an agency document stamped "secret" wound up being used in his interview Sunday night on CBS News' 60 Minutes, O'Neill denied Tuesday that classified documents were used in a new tell-all book about his two years in the administration.

"The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all," O'Neill said.

In the 60 Minutes interview, O'Neill said that at Mr. Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, "there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go."

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill.

The official American government stance on Iraq, dating to the administration of President Clinton, was that the United States sought to oust Saddam. But O'Neill said the Bush team's approach troubled him.

"For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said.

Mr. Bush, who justified the Iraq war partly by arguing the Sept. 11 attacks made preemptive U.S. strikes necessary, responded to O'Neill's claims on Monday.

"Sept. 11 made me realize that America was no longer protected by oceans, and we had to take our threats very seriously no matter where they may be materializing," Mr. Bush said. "The stated policy of my administration towards Saddam Hussein was very clear.

"Like the previous administration, we were for regime change."

Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Mr. Bush's term. But, he said, Saddam "was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11."

At the State Department, deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said Bush did not began his White House tenure determined to go to war with Saddam Hussein, but "gave Saddam Hussein an honest opportunity to turn things around and he just didn't do it."

"President Bush, Secretary Powell and our coalition partners took every step possible before resorting to force to achieve a peaceful resolution to this issue," Ereli said.

O'Neill was fired in December 2002. He had publicly questioned the need for new tax cuts given signs that the economy was starting to rebound. He had also made several high-profile gaffes, including one that hurt the dollar in world markets, and been out of the country during two stock market plunges.

O'Neill, the main source for a book by Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," gave Suskind some 19,000 documents for the book. During the 60 Minutes program, some of those documents were shown. [Simon and Schuster, the book's publisher, and CBSNews.com, are both units of Viacom.]

Treasury spokesman Rob Nichols said Monday that the department has asked the Office of Inspector General to look into the matter.

In the interview, 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl said O'Neill had got briefing materials involving Iraq. Suskind said: "There are memos. One of them, marked secret, says 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq.'"

A spokesman for 60 Minutes said only a cover sheet of the briefing materials was shown.

O'Neill, in television interviews Tuesday, said he had asked the Treasury Department's chief legal counsel "to have the documents that are OK for me to have."

Asked if he thought the internal Treasury probe was a get-even move by the Bush administration, O'Neill replied, "I don't think so. If I were secretary of the treasury and these circumstances occurred, I would have asked the inspector general to look into it."

"This is an administration, remember, that is very sensitive to the notion of leaks in part because of the ongoing investigation into the apparent leak of the name of that CIA agent last year," notes CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen.

O'Neill in the book also contends the administration's decision-making process was often chaotic and Bush Cabinet meetings made the president look "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."

O'Neill told NBC on Tuesday he was guilty of using some "vivid" language during his hundreds of hours of interviews with Suskind for the book. "If I could take it back, I would take it back," he said of the blind man quote.