{"id":16481,"date":"2008-08-05T10:30:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T14:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/16447.html"},"modified":"2008-08-05T10:30:22","modified_gmt":"2008-08-05T14:30:22","slug":"did-bush-white-house-order-a-forgery-to-connect-iraq-and-al-qaeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/did-bush-white-house-order-a-forgery-to-connect-iraq-and-al-qaeda\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Bush White House order a forgery to connect Iraq and al Qaeda?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning author\/journalist, has been a thorn in the side of the Bush White House for a few years now, but this might be the most damning revelation yet<\/a>: Suskind reports in his new book that White House officials ordered the CIA to forge a “back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.” The goal of the letter, apparently, was to “portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.”<\/p>\n

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.'”<\/p>\n

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”<\/p>\n

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda\u2014Saddam.'”<\/p>\n

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.<\/p>\n

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9\/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq \u2013 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto denied the report, calling the version of events Suskind described as “absurd.”<\/p>\n

That said, Suskind is a considerably more reliable source than the Bush White House.
\n<\/p>\n

Suskind writes in his new book that the order to create the letter was written on “creamy White House stationery.” The book suggests that the letter was subsequently created by the CIA and delivered to Iraq, but does not say how.<\/p>\n

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense. […]<\/p>\n

“It is not the sort of offense, such as assault or burglary, that carries specific penalties, for example, a fine or jail time,” Suskind writes. “It is much broader than that. It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nearly as scandalous, Suskind’s new book, to be published next week, also reports that the administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official, who told U.S. officials that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq \u2013 intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.<\/p>\n

“They secretly resettled him in Jordan, paid him $5 million \u2013 which one could argue was hush money \u2013 and then used his captive status to help deceive the world about one of the era’s most crushing truths: that America had gone to war under false pretenses,” the book says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s more, Kevin had a good item<\/a>, noting the recent related revelations, including a report that the FBI was pressured to lie<\/a> about the origins of the 2001 anthrax attacks, a report that Bush once suggested flying fake UN planes over Iraq<\/a> in the hopes of instigating a war, and a report that Dick Cheney considered an idea to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians<\/a>, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them.<\/p>\n

“Maybe it’s coincidence,” Kevin said<\/a>. “Maybe all these sources are just making stuff up. Maybe. But that’s a helluva similar pattern of allegations, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning author\/journalist, has been a thorn in the side of the Bush White House for a few years now, but this might be the most damning revelation yet: Suskind reports in his new book that White House officials ordered the CIA to forge a “back-dated, handwritten letter from the head […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}