A matter of deception.

Byline: The Register-Guard

President Bush once praised former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as "a straight shooter" and "refreshingly candid." Now, in the wake of O'Neill's allegations that the president was planning from his first days in office to oust Saddam Hussein, administration officials are attacking O'Neill's character, suggesting his recollections were skewed by bitterness over his dismissal from the Bush Cabinet.

O'Neill may well harbor resentments over his abrupt firing, but so far the administration has presented no evidence to contradict the charges. The former chief executive of Alcoa was the primary source for a new book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, who had access to thousands of documents that passed through O'Neill's office during his two years in the administration's inner circle.

O'Neill's criticisms cannot be dismissed as the rantings of a wounded soul bent on avenging his fall from political grace. They are a crippling indictment of the administration's case for war against Iraq.

In interviews this week, O'Neill said the administration was planning from its first days in office to remove Saddam without any evidence that the Iraqi leader had weapons of mass destruction.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence for weapons of mass destruction," O'Neill said. "There were allegations and assertions by people. ... To me there is real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

O'Neill's comments reinforce what many have long suspected: that the president's public case for war against Iraq was a pretext for pursuing a goal the administration had embraced long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The administration's justification for war was based on two primary assertions. The first was that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and a nuclear weapons program in a dangerously advanced state of development. Secondly, the administration claimed that Saddam had close ties to terrorists, including the al-Qaeda network.

O'Neill says these justifications were not only inaccurate, but the administration had full knowledge they weren't true. Moreover, it intentionally used them to mislead the American public in pursuit of a costly war that has diverted attention and resources from efforts to eliminate the al-Qaeda network responsible for Sept. 11.

The cynical manipulation O'Neill describes should infuriate Americans on all points of the political spectrum. The administration certainly had reasons for toppling Hussein - regime change in Iraq had been official, congressionally approved U.S. policy since the Clinton administration - but O'Neill's account suggests they were reasons for pre-emptive action that many Americans might have questioned or rejected.

O'Neill makes other allegations that paint an unflattering portrait of the administration. He describes Vice President Dick Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove as habitually putting politics before sound judgment on issues ranging from steel tariffs to global warming to the deficit. He portrays Bush as detached from policy deliberations and stubbornly attached to policies regardless of facts.

But the most serious charge - one that the administration must not be allowed to dismiss as the vindictive murmurings of a jilted insider - are those that point to a frightening, far-reaching deception of the American people about the war in Iraq.