hamper the Saddam Hussein government's ability to produce chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, but US national security personnel also reportedly hoped it would help weaken Saddam Hussein's grip on power. The Republican Party's campaign platform in the 2000 election called for "full implementation" of the Iraq Liberation Act and removal of Saddam Hussein; and key Bush advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's Deputy Paul Wolfowitz, were longstanding advocates of invading Iraq, and contributed to a September 2000 report from the Project for the New American Century that argued for using an invasion of Iraq as a means for the US to "play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security". After leaving the administration, former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill said that "contingency planning" for an attack on Iraq had been planned since the inauguration and that the first National Security Council meeting discussed of an invasion. Retired Army General Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he saw nothing to indicate the United States was close to attacking Iraq early in Bush's term. Despite key Bush advisers' stated interest in invading Iraq, little formal movement towards an invasion occurred until the 11 September 2001 attacks. According to aides who were with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on 11 September, Rumsfeld asked for: "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only Osama bin Laden." The notes also quote him as saying, "Go massive", and "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." In the days immediately following 9/11, the Bush administration national security team actively debated an invasion of Iraq. A memo written by Secretary Rumsfeld dated 27 November 2001 considers a US–Iraq war. One section of the memo questions "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a US–Iraq War. That administration opted instead to limit the initial military response to Afghanistan. President Bush began laying the public groundwork for an invasion of Iraq in a January 2002 State of the Union address, calling Iraq a member of the Axis of Evil and saying "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Over the next year, the Bush administration began pushing for international support for an invasion of Iraq, a campaign that culminated in