In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link
between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was
so successful, that a poll conducted in late 2002, showed that over half of the
people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11.
While that may have been great news for the home team back
then, the problem for Bush today is that he is never going to get 50 percent of
Americans to erase their memories of all the statements that were made and
believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make
people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The truth is that the story about Saddam supporting al Qaeda
was a key component in the case for war and the administration worked nonstop
to promote it even though the basis for the story was debunked early on by
intelligence officials.
When making public remarks and speeches indicating a
connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and
then National Security Advisor Condi Rice consistently failed to mention the
fact that intelligence agencies had dismissed it as false.
According to the March 16, 2004, report, �Iraq On The
Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements On Iraq,� from the
Committee on Government Reform, together the above five top officials �made 61
misleading statements about the strength of the Iraq-al Qaeda alliance in 52
public appearances.�
The Senate's new investigation hasn't even got off the
ground and already the future is looking grim for the Bush team. It has now
been revealed, in a newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document
made public this month, that US military intelligence specifically warned the
administration in February 2002 that the key source of information about al
Qaeda's ties to Iraq had provided "intentionally misleading" data.
While this is clear evidence that they should have known
better, over the following year, top officials continued to make false claims
that the Iraqi government was training and supporting members of bin Laden's
alleged terrorist group to bolster their rationale for war.
For instance, eight months later, in a speech on November 7,
2002, Bush told an audience: Saddam Hussein is �a threat because he is dealing
with al Qaeda . . . [A] true threat facing our country is that an al Qaeda-type
network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one
fingerprint.�
In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush
said, �Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and
statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and
protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without
fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help
them develop their own.�
On January 26, 2003, when speaking at the World Economic
Forum, Colin Powell stated, �The more we wait, the more chance there is for
this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, more
time for him to pass a weapon, share a technology, or use these weapons again.�
In his February 5, 2003, speech at the UN, Powell told the
audience: �what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much
more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus
that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder."
"Iraq today," Powell said, "harbors a deadly
terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi an associate and collaborator
of Usama bin Laden and his al Qaeda lieutenants.�
To intentionally play on the public's emotions, around the
second anniversary of 9/11, Dick Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press,
that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under
assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
Cheney also told the Heritage Foundation on October 10,
2003, that Saddam Hussein �had an established relationship with al Qaeda.�
The Bush Team Should Be Worried
The administration has
good reason to worry about the investigation. Last year, it got a glimpse of
the kind of information that will likely come out. On March 9, 2004, during
then CIA Director George Tenet's testimony before the Armed Services Committee,
when Democrats revealed that Cheney's then chief of staff, I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, had received secret intelligence briefings in August
2002 on Saddam's ties to al Qaeda, from then Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy Douglas Feith.
Prior to that hearing, Feith had already said that he never
gave any such briefings, which in turn supported the theory that a private
secret intelligence group in the White House was set up to manufacture the case
for war. Tenet, himself told the committee that he had only first learned of
Feith's private briefings "last week."
Feith better not be too comfortable in his retirement
because he is definitely going to be spending some time up on the Hill.
Virtually everything that went wrong in Iraq, relating to matters that Congress
will be investigating, can be traced back to Feith's door. He played a leading
role in the run-up to war.
The buck stops with Feith on its way to Cheney and Bush. Who
knows, maybe Feith will agree to take the hit and he and Libby can bunk
together in prison.
The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office
of Special Plans (OSP) were both established under Feith's authority and will
in all likelihood garner particular interest during the investigation.
The OSP, with the help of
Ahmed Chalabi and his band of defectors, is believed to have cooked up the most
alarming pre-war intelligence and "stovepiped" it to Bush through
Rumsfeld and Cheney, without the vetting of any intelligence official, in order
to establish the existence of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda.
The content of Feith's August 2002 private briefings have
been described as a cherry-picked collection of raw, uncorroborated pieces of
information, which painted a false picture of a link between Saddam and 9/11
The investigation will surely focus on October 2003, when
Feith sent a memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing proof of a
definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it somehow got published
in the November 2003 Weekly Standard, complete with the memo�s classified annex
claiming that its list of Iraq�al Qaeda contacts proved �an operational
relationship from the early 1990s� and that �there can no longer be any serious
argument about whether Saddam Hussein�s Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda to plot against Americans.�
The Defense Department immediately ran for cover and issued
a statement saying that �[t]he classified annex was not an analysis of the
substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no
conclusions.�
And on March 9, 2004, when Tenet again testified before the
Armed Services Committee, he made sure to tell the committee that the CIA �did
not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document.�
The investigation team will no doubt want to interview the
neocons' best friend, Ahmed Chalabi, but he has already demonstrated that he
could care less if he's accused of deliberately misleading the US in making the
case for war, because he got what he wanted.
"We are heroes in error," he told the News
Telegraph on February 19, 2004. "As far as we're concerned we've been
entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in
Baghdad," he said, adding, "What was said before is not
important."
Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent
Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption.