New Book Claims White House Forged Documents To Promote Saddam-al Qaeda Link

Ron Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World, makes the claim that the White House ordered CIA head George Tenet to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq’s intelligence to Saddam Hussein, and backdated it before 9/11.  Suskind also says BushCo knew there were no WMD’s, and knew it with enough time to have stopped the invasion of Iraq.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from (Iraqi intelligence chief Tahir Jalil) 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.”

The Iraqi intelligence chief was paid $5 million, sent to live in Jordan after he showed there were no WMD’s, and the US indicated that he was held captive to hide the fact that we went to war under false pretenses.

Suskind, who won Pulitzer during his years with the Wall Street Journal, also writes that Cheney’s used a strategy he developed a a result of the Watergate fiasco in the Nixon White House of keeping Bush suffienciently unware of what was going on so as to have deniability.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he’d authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

Also noteworthy is this frightening, but unexplained event that occurred during preparation of the book:

Suskind writes in the acknowledgments that his research assistant, Greg Jackson, “was sent to New York on a project for the book” in September 2007 and was “detained by federal agents in Manhattan. He was interrogated and his notes were confiscated, violations of his First and Fourth Amendment rights.” The author provides no further detail.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.