Did White House fake link between Saddam and Al Qaeda?

First, former CIA Director George Tenet told the president it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came efforts by the Bush White House to discredit critics, like ambassador Joe Wilson, who questioned the wisdom of going to war in Iraq.

Now comes a new book by author Ron Suskind claiming that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein to link the Iraq regime to Al Qaeda. The White House calls the assertion nonsense.

In “The Way of the World,” to be published today, Suskind writes:

The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq –- thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the vice president’s office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.

Suskind says the order to forge such a letter was written on “creamy White House stationery” but gives no details about how it was created or how it was delivered to Iraq.

The White House dismissed the accusation as so much sensationalism from a sensationalizing journalist. According to a story about the forgery in Politico, spokesman Tony Fratto said, "The allegation that the White House directed anyone to forge a document from Habbush to Saddam is just absurd.”

Tenet weighed in to defend the administration, issuing a statement saying:

There was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from CIA ever involved in any such effort.

Asked about Tenet's response to claims of a forgery on the "Today Show" this morning, Suskind dismissed it as "part of George's memory issue."

Suskind was last in the news for co-authoring former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's kiss-and-tell memoir, "The Price of Loyalty." He is not viewed as a friend of the Bush White House. As Fratto said:

Ron Suskind makes a living from gutter journalism. He is about selling books and making wild allegations that no one can verify, including the numerous bipartisan commissions that have reported on prewar intelligence.

On the same day Suskind's book was published, a conservative national defense analyst issued a report saying that there were WMD and that the president kept quiet about a discovery that could have blown his critics out of the water to keep terrorists in the dark.

Retired Maj. Gen. Jerry Curry, who ran for the Republican nomination for president this year, reported in a national security blog item that U.S. operatives secretly transported Iraqi uranium to Canada for examination during a two-week airlift from Baghdad that featured a ship voyage crossing two oceans. He said of Bush:

He made a very brave stand, a resolute stand ... in which he decided that he wasn't going to blab everything to the press.... And in the meantime while he kept it quiet, he was buying time from the terrorists to get all that stuff out of the country. So that's what was done -- he just very quietly kept his mouth shut.

The press beat him to death for the last several years, and now it turns out that, yes, there were weapons of mass destruction.

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: President Bush at a 2003 briefing with, from left, Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. Credit: Eric Draper / White House

Comments

[scootmandubious]

I can't believe you are asking the question about whether or not the administration tried to forge a connection between Saddam Hussein and Obama, despite the volume of evidence on this already being presented.

Even after the connection was disproved there are numerous acocunts of Bush and, especially, Cheney, making the connection...not to mention their surrogates.

And that wasn't the only tool BushCo tried using.

In the aftermath of the 'alleged' soving of the anthrax murders, I delved back to December 2001, and found a N.Y. Times article, easily found via search engine, that documents something equally troubling.

3 months after 9/11 and the anthrax scare, after it had been demonstrably proven that the anthrax could not possibly have come from Iraq, the administration was using the 'evidence' of an alleged tie-in as a pretext for attacking Iraq. Stories were planted in the media, including ABC News, who is now the target of those wondering who it was that planted the story. So far, ABC is not responding.

One would think that if somebody deliberately planted false information, and that information turned out to be an intentional falsehood, that source would no longer be able to hide under a cloak of anonymity.

That assumes, of course, that the media is not complicit.

I don't think that is something we can still safely assume.

[scootmandubious]

Ack.....I need to proofread.....that 1st line should read

I can't believe you are asking the question about whether or not the administration tried to forge a connection between Saddam Hussein and AL-Qaeda.

(if you can't amend it...then I guess, I will just upload this correction.)

No more sushi for lunch for me.

[BrianGriffinLovesYou]

Looks like the house is crumbling, bit by bit. One day the Iraq War will be as infamous as Watergate, & in the same way. If we're lucky, that is.

[James Smith]

The yellowcake referred to above is NOT NEWS. It was documented and guarded by UN inspectors since before the 1991 Gulf War.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080706/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_yellowcake_mission

Furthermore, it is NOT a WMD. From the comments on your link:

"Only after intensive processing does it become low-enriched uranium, which can fuel reactors producing power. [Only] highly enriched uranium can be used in nuclear bombs."

[anonymous]

The media isn't complicit, just lazy. They have completely abdicated their responsibility to the American people. Why bother with investigative work when you can get your own TV show and a high six figure income just by asking someone to give you a prediction on who will win the next presidential race every Sunday? Investigative work requires skill, time and effort. Getting your own show just requires a short skirt or a loud mouth.

[abby0802]

Did the Bush administration lie?

When haven't they lied, misled, distorted, etc.?

An extremely corrupt, self-serving administration.

If all the truth about this administration came out we would shudder.....

[Archer070]

Ooohh, yes, absolLUTEly there were atomic bombs and CBW warheads and stuff, and George W. Bush, that noble brave mighty soul, kept it quiet.

If anyone wants to make a mint they can start manufacturing relics of WMD fragments and charge damp-eyed Republicans a fortune to fly them to the shrine.

[SPENCER]

My God, there are no articles in the WP (except Dan Froomkin in his column), the NYT and the LAT, except this blog, and you have the audacity to "balance" this earth-shattering revelation with a guy who wrote on a national security blog?

Why don't you go to http://www.ronsuskind.com/thewayoftheworld/cast_of_characters/ and see who his sources are? Two of them are from the Iraq Operations Group. Others have great reputations with some better veracity than Jerry Curry.

[dharper]

My God, this is never ending. This constant he said/she said/they said scenario is far past any sense of reality.

The media, with their 'brilliant and astute' reporters, have written, or pontificated on TV, every possible scenario that can be imagined and with their usual scapegoat, 'anonymous source', can not be held accountable for their statements.

Politicians from both parties play the 'blame the other side' game constantly depending upon the poll of the day. It all becomes nauseating after a while since nothing is ever proven one way or the other.

Conspiracy theorists have existed for every war this nation has been involved in. There are those who still maintain that FDR knew that Japan was going to bomb Pearl Harbor. There are those that continue to dig into the Bay of Pigs invasion by JFK. LBJ was driven from office by all of the 'experts' who knew more about Viet Nam than his administration. All it does is sell books and get them on TV to further their agendas.

Without a doubt there have been errors in judgement with this present conflict but does anyone out there truly believe that there is one Mid Eastern nation that will actually reveal to the rest of the world what their actual military capacity is and what they intend to do with it. That includes Isreal.

This is a very different type of war, one in which the opposition has absolutely no compunction in utilizing any means it can to destroy their adversaries. No longer do we go 'toe to toe' with the enemy as we did in WW1, WW2, Korea or Viet Nam. This enemy attacks the innocent civilian population with no regard whatsoever for the value of human life and in so doing accomplishes their ultimate goal, anxiety and fear to create a divisive split in our national fabric. They are accomplishing this very successfully and for those people who have maintained that this is not a real threat you will live to regret it with the loss of many more lives right here in this country.

There will be another 9-11 in this country - we just don't know where or when. History is going to validate much of what Bush has done. He has done some acts in error but he has done many more on the positive side. He does not act alone, no administration does but with the House and Senate he has to deal with it is a wonder anything gets done at all.

[Rodney Lamprey, jr.]

The statement attributed to Gen. Curry is ignorant in many ways. Why would there be a "two-week airlift" that "featured a ship voyage across two oceans". Doesn't the Bush administration use airplanes for an "airlift"?

Why would the US ever ship uranium to CANADA?

When has Bush ever kept quiet with an opportunity to slam Democrats or anti-war folks, even when based on extreme falsehoods? Bush only keeps quiet when asked for proof, documents, or e-mails.

Why are Gertzenzang and Neuman still shilling for Bush? The inclusion of the GOP operative Curry's statements in this story are laughable and not related to the Bush-CIA forgery story.

[King]

To think that ANY of the information coming from Iraq or Afghanistan is ture is absurd at best. This is all disinformation, sprinkled with truth as to not sound totally ridiculous. Every story, either from Irq or Afghanisatn has been twisted and the facts changed. I know this to be fact. I just came home from Afghanistan and personally witnessed event described recently in the news. Don't beleive a single number (#) you see in any article, it is all rubbish. So, just read every story and remember that you are only getting, at most, 50% of the truth, if that.

US Soldier.

[john shermer]

Why is this a question? Any person following the stream of White House propoganda over the last 6 years easily sees that they talked about 9-11 and Iraq being associated endlessly.

I think there must be fundamental intelligence issue here that separates Dems from Repubs.....on average.

I know there are brilliant Repubs but I think on average Repubs are really not interested in delving into issues in depth. I think they are more likely to stop at the first or 2nd layer of information and will be much less likely to question or compare the information they are hearing. They want it to be black/white and easy to grasp.

Dems....on average....are less likely to believe everything they hear and are interested in questioning the source.

I was talking about how the White House linked Al Qaeda and Saddam daily over 5 years ago. I was not alone. Tom Hartman....Peter B Collins....Stephanie Miller. All "left wing" radio hosts talked about the White House propaganda daily.

This is not an 'anti-US' conversation by the way. It is an anti-G. W. Bush statement. Look at what Bush has done. It's a 1000 times worse than Nixon. We live in a time where people have so much access to what is going on that it can be debilitating.

Obama in '08. He's not perfect but I think he's honest, sincere, and can move us far beyond pitting ourselves against the rest of the world.

[George]

There has been nothing since the election in 2000 that has instilled one bit of authenticity from this bunch of hooligans and criminals. After nearly 8 terrible years of destruction of liberty at home and misguided killing abroad, I can cay that I have learned only one truth from the Bush Administration.

NEVER TRUST A REPUBLICAN.

[Richard S]

No connection huh, why doesn't the medial report on this evidence? Because it buries their democratic talking points..

http://www.thexreport.com

[wtobias]

as of yet no solid proof of any thing only the word of someone selling his book cant take it to court so again nothing. for all the laws that he has broken and a congess of dems who hate bush you would think that they could find one thing but after 8 years nothing you cant say its a coverup if every one knows about it and are wrighting books on it .

[Bob W]

This story seem to miss the point, namely if the Whitehouse didn't produce this forged letter *WHO DID*? We know the letter exists, we know that it is baloney, so who, other than the Whitehouse had any incentive for this letter to be created and found? There could well be somebody else that could have benefited from such a disclosure, but the list of suspects has got to be awfully short. Somebody should ask Fratto and Tenet who they think was responsible since they are so sure it wasn't them.

[Tobi Dragert]

So ... NOW can we impeach?????

[Joe]

Wait. Let me get this straight?

Bush manages to keep all of this secret from EVERYONE, even those under threat of criminal charges and whatnot. But some random blogger is able to uncover nuclear secrets?

What's worse is that, after explaining (AND agreeing with) the rationale that it "keeps the terrorists in the dark," he then blabs it to everyone, endangering the country he allegedly holds so dear? Why does this right-wing, alleged patriot hate America? Why is he supplying this supposedly sensitive information to all the terrorists and (God forbid!) liberals on the Internet?

If his readers actually believe him, they should be accusing him of treason.

LA Times: I understand giving people equal time. But why equal time for nutjobs? Shouldn't there be some minimum credibility threshold before you report about things? Even the original accusation about Bush doesn't appear to be well-sourced (unless you simply neglected to mention evidence provided in the book), even if it has become believable due to Bush's poor conduct.

Sometimes I wonder if I should read the tabloids instead. They're more entertaining and they can't be that much less careful with the facts...

[MKochinski]

According to the AP:
"Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said."

The yellowcake in question was from before the first gulf war, and under guard of the U.N.

It took me 30 seconds to find this out using google.

Instead of simply quoting Maj. Gen. Curry without question, I wish what passes for the media today would do a little research.

[S Davis]

I remember how the WH said Paul O'Neill was a little crazy, but it looks like he has been proven right. Iraq and getting a war going has been an obsession from the start.

[David]

Yes, the media is complicit. They won't put out any real news as to offend their corporate pay masters. The real fact of the matter is boys and girls is that your freedom was long ago taken from you. You just haven't figured it out yet.

[MKochinski]

Well, let's see. The White House denied anyone in the administration was involved in outing Valery Plame. They denied that the Justice Department has been politicized. They denied that they cherry-picked information about Iraq. They claimed they never tried to associate Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Since then, there's been some pretty conclusive evidence that when the White House tells us something, there's some justification to be skeptical.

[Mark E]

Habbush and Saddam's #2, Izzat al Douri were BOTH linked to al Qaeda (and BOTH have cooperated with them post invasion as well) and have/had zero reason to admit their cooperation. I've followed these two and many other of Saddam's goons at www.regimeofterror.com for years and of course the media can't be bothered with getting into the meat and potatoes of Saddam's boys and al Qaeda members admitting prewar cooperation on online forums and while in custody, not to mention while being caught working together...

[Brad]

SURPRISE!!!!!
OLD NEWS--
SAME STORY OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN!!!

Republicans are the most honest,trustworthy,straightforward,truthful honorable group of patriotic politicians that ever lived...
They wouldn't lie to us...
Just look how great the last 8 years have been for us...
NOT!!!
NOT!!!
AND DOUBLE NOT!!!
HAS AMERICA HAD ENOUGH YET??!!!

[Steve J.]

"a conservative national defense analyst issued a report saying that there were WMD and that the president kept quiet about a discovery that could have blown his critics out of the water to keep terrorists in the dark."

LMFAO!!! That material was under IAEA seal at Tuwaitha nad has been for YEARS, well before the Iraq War. THIS WAS ALL PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE!!!