NEW YORK, Jan 12: Former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill said in a candid interview on Sunday that the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq just days after President Bush took office in Jan 2001 - more than two years before the start of the invasion.

Appearing in the CBS show, 60 minutes, Mr O'Neill said he never saw any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.

Mr O'Neill, who was Mr Bush's choice to head the treasury department and has shared his experiences with Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, author of a book, The price of loyalty", said removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a top priority at Mr Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, within days of his inauguration and eight months before the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.

Mr O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Mr Bush's economic team in Dec 2002, told CBS the discussion on Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later and that he was given internal memos, including one outlining a "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq".

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

Mr O'Neill also raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd", a key constituency.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," said Mr O'Neill, adding that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration."

The former treasury secretary accused Vice-President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says the former secretary.

Twice during stock market meltdowns, Mr O'Neill was not available to the president: he was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with Irish rock star Bono.

"Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show," says Ron Suskind, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote "The price of loyalty". "He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, 'You know, you're getting quite a cult following.' And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest."