It should be crystal clear by now that everything the Bush administration has said it did because of 9/11 was in fact its agenda before 9/11. It did not invade Iraq because of 9/11, it did not spy on its own citizens because of 9/11, and it is almost as certain that it did not begin its quest to quash civil liberties and deny Constitutional rights because of 9/11. These were all things they wanted to do from day one.

The Washington Post has come out with an article which shows that the Bush administration was trying to acquire all Americans’ phone records long before 9/11, and given the administration’s virtual blindness to terrorism at the time, it’s damned certain that this wasn’t being done to make us safe from outside attack. It was late February, 2001, barely a month and a week after Bush took office.

We also know that Bush wanted not only to topple Saddam Hussein, but to invade the country, put in peacekeeping forces, and divvy up the oil fields–all from the very first month of the administration, and all under the cloak of secrecy. From January 2004, when Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill spilled the beans on what he saw in the Bush White House:

[O’Neill] got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’” adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.

Based on his interviews with O’Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth.

He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts,” which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.

In short, the new WaPo article simply reinforces what so many of us have been sure of in our guts for so long: nothing the Bush administration has done has been centered on fighting terrorism, but instead simply to forward their own Neocon agenda. This is clear not just because their “reactions” to 9/11 all predate 9/11, but because the administration’s counter-terror record, where it does not intersect their agenda, has been dismal: cities and municipalities underfunded in key counter-terror capabilities, the vast majority of incoming cargo still not scanned or checked when entering the country, massive resistance to forming committees to analyze and correct flaws in our counter-terrorism policy, foot-dragging in complying with their recommendations, virtually giving up on finding bin Laden and turning away from controlling Afghanistan, and so on–the list goes on. Instead we get tax cuts for the rich, a useless and even harmful missile defense shield, a quagmire in Iraq, spying on our own citizens completely divorced from counter-terrorism, and a drive to repeal or make null and void our Constitution rights and liberties.

Where it counts, this administration is not fighting the war on terror. They are only using it as a convenient excuse for imposing the Neocon dream of a militaristic, corporatist police state.