Handwritten notes that show the former U.S. president’s reaction to 9/11 have been made public for the first time.

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In the run up to the 15^th anniversary of the famous terrorist attacks, Bush’s former press secretary, Ari Fleischer, has published the notes he had made in an immediate reaction to the atrocity. Predictably, his initial response was to get revenge. He firstly called his Vice President, Dick Cheney, from Air Force One and said:

We’re going to get the bastards. We’re at war.

He then went to his aides, where he said:

When we find out who did this, they’re not going to like me as president. Somebody’s going to pay.

I can’t wait to find out who did it.

It’s going to take a while and we’re not going to have a little slap on the wrist crap.

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This was just nine days before Bush started his ‘war on terror’, telling the nation:

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.  It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

The notes, which also reveal Bush’s struggled attempt to get back to Washington, are thought to be the only original record of what the president said in private on September 9/11 and were considered to be so valuable that they had been kept in a bank vault.

So the question is, was this his true reaction or was it staged? If the conspiracy theories are anything to go by then he pretty much knew the attack was coming, which would lead to the belief that perhaps his reaction was a bit of a red herring. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

To read Tony Blair’s private letters to George Bush in the run up to the Iraq war, click HERE.