It’s 9:53 AM, on September 11th, 2001. Sixteen minutes after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld is outside the building, helping out with the injured.

Monitors at the National Security Agency (NSA) intercept a phone call from an associate of Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The call is to someone in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The caller said he had “heard good news” and that another target was still to come; an indication he knew another airliner, the one that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania, was at that very moment zeroing in on Washington.
CBS News

At 12:05 p.m., George Tenet informed Rumsfeld of the contents of the intercept. Rumsfeld felt that it was not enough information, or in his own idiosyncratic words, “no good basis for hanging hat.”

More solid information became available later in the afternoon when the CIA discovered “the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected al Qaeda operatives.”

“One guy is associate of Cole bomber,” the notes say, a reference to the October 2000 suicide boat attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which had also been the work of bin Laden.

By 2:40 p.m. Rumsfeld was swinging into action. According to an aide’s notes, Rumsfeld wanted the:

“best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.” – meaning Saddam Hussein – “at same time. Not only UBL” – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden…

…”Go massive,” the notes quote him as saying. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”

The next day Rumsfeld expanded on this theme:

White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke meets with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. During the briefing Rumsfeld suggests that the US should bomb Iraq in retaliation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke will later recall in his book, Against All Enemies. “… We all said, ‘but no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan’ and Rumsfeld said, ‘There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.’”

Then, a few days later, according to the Washington Post:

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush signed a 2½-page document marked “TOP SECRET” that outlined the plan for going to war in Afghanistan as part of a global campaign against terrorism.

Almost as a footnote, the document also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq, senior administration officials said.

The previously undisclosed Iraq directive is characteristic of an internal decision-making process that has been obscured from public view.

You should read the whole Washington Post article, which appeared on January 12, 2003, two months before the war.

Here is another snip, that demonstrates clearly how the facts were fixed around the policy.

By the time the policy was set, opponents were left arguing over the tactics — such as whether to go to the United Nations — without clearly understanding how the decision was reached in the first place. “It simply snuck up on us,” a senior State Department official said.

The administration has embarked on something “quite extraordinary in American history, a preventive war, and the threshold for justification should be extraordinarily high,” said G. John Ikenberry, an international relations professor at Georgetown University. But “the external presentation and the justification for it really seems to be lacking,” he said. “The external presentation appears to mirror the internal decision-making quite a bit.”

And this presciently sums it all up:

After some of these meetings at the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, skeptical of military action without the necessary diplomatic groundwork, would return to his office on the seventh floor of the State Department, roll his eyes and say, “Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq,” State Department officials said.

“I do believe certain people have grown theological about this,” said another administration official who opposed focusing so intently on Iraq. “It’s almost a religion — that it will be the end of our society if we don’t take action now.”

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