Letter Touted as Al-Qaeda-Iraq Link a CIA Forgery, Ordered by Bush

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 9:37 AM on August 5, 2008.

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 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."

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.'"

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."

"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-Saddam.'"

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.

"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 -- 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 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.

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. [...]

"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."

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 -- intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

"They secretly resettled him in Jordan, paid him $5 million -- which one could argue was hush money -- 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.

Tagged as: bush, iraq, journalism, cia, saddam, al-qaeda, ron suskind, pulitzer prize

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.