Suskind: White House forged back-dated letter to concoct Iraq/9-11 link

Pullitzer-Prizewinning journalist Ron Suskind reports in a new book that the White House forged and back-dated a letter to suggest a false link between Iraq and the 9-11 attacks.

(Suskind's the reporter who brought us the phrase "reality based community.")

The letter purported to be a missive from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. It got a lot of media play. Reporters cited it as proof that Saddam helped train one of the 9-11 hijackers.

Suskind reports that the White House ordered the CIA to create the phony document to gin up support for the Iraq war.

The book is called The Way of the World. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

Correction: The original story of the allegedly forged document was published in Decmber 2003, approximately 10 months after the U.S. invasion, on the day Saddam Hussein was taken into custody.

Comments

[mitchell porter]

Lindsay, you have the details wrong. Follow your link. The letter first appeared in the press on the day of Saddam's capture, not before the invasion.

[mitchell porter]

For a long time my "favorite" theory has been that Iraq Did It, in fact ran the terror campaign since WTC 1993, and that the White House also knew this from the beginning, but we were never supposed to know about it. The original attempt to bring down the WTC came two years to the day after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait; and a few months later Clinton bombed Iraqi intelligence HQ, ostensibly in retaliation for an attempt to assassinate Bush Sr in Kuwait - but that was just a cover story, you see. The deception and doublethink just escalated from there, until, ten years later, Iraq was being invaded in response to 9/11, only Iraq wasn't being overtly blamed for 9/11, but it had to be prevented from carrying out a 9/11.

If you entertain a hypothesis like that, remarkable things become possible. Back when the letter that Suskind writes about was first in the news, I dismissed it as a poison pill, leaked through a friendly journalist on the occasion of Saddam's capture, intended to preemptively discredit any real evidence of the connection that might be forthcoming.

I advance these ideas in a mood of whimsical despair that they will ever be taken seriously. There are a lot of people who believe the Bush administration to be capable of any lie; there is a diehard minority who think the evidence of The Connection is out there, but the liberals in the media and the CIA won't let the people hear it; but the idea that the propaganda is a deliberate substitute for the real evidence, because the real evidence is a state secret, is apparently just too contorted. And of course, my case isn't helped by the sheer amount of guesswork that is necessary.

For example, consider the anthrax. One can construct a narrative according to which Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush Sr all acted to bury the details of an American anthrax aerosolization program back in 1975; unearthed it in the late 1980s and passed that information, along with Ames-strain anthrax, to Iraq via the UK's Ministry of Defense, biowarfare division, then run by David Kelly, in order to prevent Iran ever controlling the Gulf; only to have it show up in the anthrax letters of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, not as an attack, but as a warning that Iraq, now an enemy, was willing to arm al Qaeda with it. (Lest the lethal potency of aerosolized anthrax be regarded as just another Bush fiction, let me recall the statement by Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, that five pounds of the stuff could kill half of Washington DC. The extent to which Clinton banged on about exactly the same things as Bush, the fact that he bombed Iraq many times and even made regime change there US policy, is another of those facts occluded by partisan vision.)

But enough. If anyone has a taste for this stuff, and isn't allergic to Free Republic, you can see some of my speculations here, back before I threw in the towel and moved on.

[Andrew Wang]

Bush is the worst president in American history. Bush facilitated the 9/11 attacks. Subsequently, Bush lied to Congress and the American people relative to the reasons for invading Iraq. Bush purposefully misled Congress and the American people. Then, Bush murdered more than 4,000 United States service members. And Bush wounded more than 30,000 United States service members. In torturing prisoners of war, Bush patently violated the Geneva Convention. Bush unlawfully wiretapped United States citizens. In using “signing statements” to challenge hundreds of laws passed by Congress, Bush violated the Constitution. Bush has ignored global warming. Bush is guilty of criminal negligence relative to the response to Hurricane Katrina. Bush disobeys our democratic values and Constitution. Bush is a disgrace to the United States.

Furthermore, Ron Suskind has revealed that Bush directed the forgery of a letter connecting Iraq to the 9/11 attacks. Bush is beyond help.

Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA