Explosive charges from Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind, who has been proven right before. Don’t miss this interview with Suskind aired on NPR this morning. What Suskind says in his new book is that the Iraqi intelligence chief was a CIA asset, and told them in advance that there were no WMD (they were also told this by the Iraqi Foregn Minister, who was a secret CIA asset), but further, that in the fall of 2003 when the invasion failed to produce any WMD, that the CIA was ordered to fabricate a backdated letter, ostensibly by the same Iraqi intelligence chief, which linked Muhammad Atta, 9/11 hijacker, to Saddam Hussein. Suskind even says the order to do so was written on “creamy White House stationery.” This is a charge not simply of very impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors, but crimes very similar to those at the heart of Watergate. It was the misuse of the CIA for coverup purposes that was the “smoking gun” that directly forced Nixon to resign. Here, Suskind is alleging that the White House misused the CIA to cover up the lack of WMD in Iraq, after the invasion, by retroactively and falsely linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11.
Is the relative failure of this forgery to convince the public in 2003 the reason Cheney backed down on his Atta claims in 2004? Or was the letter forged in order to discredit the Iraqi source who warned the US pre-war that Iraq had no WMD?
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