Excerpts From Al Gore's Speech At Georgetown University - October 2004

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102004X.shtml

"We were told by the President that war was his last choice. It is now clear from the newly available evidence that it was always his first preference. His former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, confirmed that Iraq was Topic A at the very first meeting of the Bush National Security Council, just ten days after the inauguration. "It was about finding a way to do it, that was the tone of the President, saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.'"

"Even as late as three months ago, when the growing chaos and violence in Iraq was obvious to anyone watching the television news, Bush went out of his way to demean the significance of a National Intelligence Estimate warning that his policy in Iraq was failing and events were spinning out of control. Bush described this rigorous and formal analysis as just guessing. If that's all the respect he has for reports given to him by the CIA, then perhaps it explains why he completely ignored the warning he received on August 6 th, 2001, that bin Laden was determined to attack our country. From all appearances, he never gave a second thought on that report until he finished reading My Pet Goat on September 11 th."

"It was in this context that the President himself was presented with a CIA report with the headline, more alarming and more pointed than any I saw in eight years I saw of daily CIA briefings: "bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S."

The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush was about the so-called Millenium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999 and less-specific warnings about the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. In both cases these warnings in the President's Daily Briefing were followed, immediately, the same day - by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the White House of all of the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened attack."

"But we now know, from a document uncovered by the New Yorker and dated just two weeks to the day after Bush's inauguration, that his National Security Counsel was ordered to "meld" its review of "operational policies toward rogue states" with the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force's "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

"In the spring of 2001, when Cheney issued the administration's national energy plan - the one devised in secret by corporations and lobbyist that he still refuses to name - it included a declaration that "the [Persian] Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy."