The Daily Sandwich

"We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish." -Sir Karl Popper

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Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Thursday, August 18, 2005

A domestic Downing Street Memo? Yup.

The National Security Archives at George Washington University has released documents indicating that planning for the invasion of Iraq began as soon as (brace yourself) October, 2001.
They also suggest that the administration was being warned about the lack of post-war strategy before the invasion began.

The new documents, released this month to the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act, also provide more evidence on when the Bush administration began planning for regime change in Iraq -- as early as October 2001.

The declassified records relate mainly to the so-called "Future of Iraq Project," an effort, initially run by the State Department then by the Pentagon, to plan for the transition to a new regime after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. They provide detail on each of the working groups and give the starting date for planning as October 2001.

Entire sections of a Powerpoint presentation the State Department prepared on November 1, 2002 -- including those covering "What We Have Learned So Far" and "Implications for the Real Future of Iraq" -- have been censored as still-classified information.