In a new book chronicling his rocky two-year tenure and in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes", O'Neill said removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a top priority at Bush's very first National Security Council meeting-within days of the inauguration and eight months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
O'Neill told CBS the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later and that he was given internal memos, including one outlining a "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq."
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," O'Neill told Time magazine in a separate interview. "There were allegations and assertions by people... To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else."
