revealed to Salon that prior to the invasion, then-CIA director George Tenet briefed Bush on intelligence that Hussein had no WMD, but the president chose to keep the intelligence secret.

Author Ron Suskind reported that Bush was also informed in early 2003 that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

The Sunday Times revealed in 2005 that top-secret British documents showed "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration before the war began.

Mickey Herskowitz, who was hired in 1999 to help Bush construct an autobiography, said that the then-Texas governor had talked about invading Iraq even before taking the presidential oath.

"I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," Herskowitz told freelance journalist Russ Baker. "One of the things he said to me, is 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it."

"He said, 'If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"