New nails in the coffin of justifications

New nails in the coffin of justifications



by pv vivekanand


IT is indeed water that flowed under the bridge by now, but a revelation that Washington concocted a fake letter purporting to show a link between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda exposes yet again the Bush administration's determined and deceptive one-track move towards invading and occupying Iraq more than five years ago.
It was reportedly earlier that US Vice-President Dick Cheney had ordered intelligence preparations in order to set the ground for military action against Iraq as early as Sept.14, 2001, three days after the purportedly Al Qaeda air assaults in New York and Washington.
Cheney and close neocon aides set up a new office from where they processed — "doctored" would be more appropriate —  "intelligence" gathered by various US spying agencies before sending it to the White House. It is now known that every bit of false intelligence that reached the White House and other offices which mattered in Washington originated in or passed through the Cheney-run Office of Special Operations.
As such it is not difficult to accept the revelation made by Washington-based journalist Ron Suskind, who notes in his new book, "The Way of the World," that the fake letter showing an Iraq-Al Qaeda link was reported earlier but that it had been treated as if it were genuine.
The letter was supposedly written by Tahir Jalil Habbush Al Tikriti, Saddam's intelligence supremo, to the then Iraqi president.
"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 Mohammed 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 (Central Intelligence Agency) to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link."
Suskind names two people who received the order to forge the letter —  Rob Richer, the CIA's former head of the Near East division and deputy director of clandestine operations and John Maquire, who oversaw the CIA's Iraq Operations Group.
Shortly after the Sept.11 attacks, Cheney himself and several other top Bush administration officials declared that there was contact between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Czechoslovakia and this was evidence that Saddam played a role in the assaults on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC.
While the alleged link was played up prominently in the mainstream corporate media in the US and around the world, a subsequent intelligence report that belied the contention was downplayed. Cheney and neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and others continued to maintain that Saddam and Osama Bin Laden were linked. The one senior official to say otherwise was then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who admitted that all talk of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam did not stand up to scrutiny.
However, the Cheney-driven build-up for war against Iraq continued at a high pitch. They were helped by their allies in London, including Lord David Owen, who made a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
By February 2003 — one month before US military tanks rolled across the borders of Iraq — more than 63 per cent of Americans were convinced that Saddam had ordered the Sept.11 attacks and posed much graver threats to their security and well-being.
We in this part of the world were left wondering how Osama Bin Laden could have had a link with Saddam. On many occasions, Bin Laden has stated that he loathed Saddam and that he held the Iraqi strongman responsible for the "tragedies" that befell the Middle East as a result of his 1990 invasion of Kuwait that brought foreign military forces to the region.
Bin Laden considered Saddam a hypocrite and unbeliever who used Islam for political purposes. He often cited Saddam's off-again, on-again ban against alcohol in Iraq as an example of how the Iraqi leader was manipulating religious edicts.
In late 1998 that Bin Laden spurned a Saddam offer of safe refuge in Iraq after US forces fired missiles at a militant base in Afghanistan following Al Qaeda attacks on two US embassies in Africa.
Former American secretary of state Madeleine Albright told the British Broadcasting Corporation in a May 2004 interview: "I never believed that Al Qaeda was involved with Saddam Hussein before. I now do think that Al Qaeda and various terrorist groups are operating within Iraq."
As could be expected, the White House and the CIA categorically denied Suskind's charge in "The Way of the World."
"The notion that the White House directed anyone to forge a letter from Habbush to Saddam Hussein is absurd," Reuters quoted White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto as saying.
Former CIA Director George Tenet, in a statement distributed by the White House, said: "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."
Interestingly, Tenet appeared to be referring to the Office of Special Operations when he said:
"It is well established that, at my direction, CIA resisted efforts on the part of some in the administration to paint a picture of Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections that went beyond the evidence."
Suskind's revelations are indeed new nails in the coffin of all justifications for the US-led invasion of Iraq — not that the world needed them since it has been established beyond doubt that the neconservatives in Washington had for long planned military action against that country. They marked time until George Bush Junior came along as president in January 2001 and the New York and Washington assaults took place nine months later.