As Politico writes about Ron Suskind’s new book:
Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed 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."
Rereading the original Coughlin story:
Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
…
The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq’s ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.
"We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda," he said. "But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."
Allawi is well known to be a CIA asset and seems to well have been the messenger between CIA and Coughlin.
When the White House ordered the CIA to forge the letter with regard to al-Qaeda, it also ordered to include something that furthered their claim on Niger uranium shipment. When the Coughlin story appeared the Niger claim had already been debunked. I wonder why it was included at all.
We still do not know if the original Niger uranium claims, written on paper stolen from the Niger embassy in Rome, were an operation run outside the administration through Michel ‘Cauldron’ Ledeen or a direct White House/CIA operation.
If Suskind is correct this increases the likelihood that both the Atta case and the Niger forgeries were genuine CIA products.
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Sidenote:
In 2006 Judith Miller Con Coughlin claimed that Iran is training al-Qaeda.