Monday, November 7, 2005
Leakgate, the CIA, Iraq and 9/11
The Leakgate imbroglio has put the spotlight on the CIA's opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq war policy - with questions swirling about who at the agency thought it was a good idea to send Bush-bashing war critic Joe Wilson to verify key administration claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions.
But the Agency's double-dealing on evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction begs another question: Was the CIA an honest broker of information that seemed, early on, to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks?
Longtime Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing - who drafted the 1982 law that was supposed to be at the center of the Leakgate scandal - has been arguing for weeks now that the CIA's permanent bureaucracy had a hidden agenda against the Iraq war.
Writing on OpinionJournal.com on Sunday, Toensing went so far as to suggest that the CIA's decision to enlist Wilson is beginning to look like "a brilliant covert action against the White House."
Was a similar strategy employed whenever inconvenient evidence materialized linking Iraq to 9/11?
Since two Iraqi defectors first reported in Nov. 2001 that radical Islamists had been trained at Saddam's Salman Pak terrorist camp to hijack airplanes using techniques similar to those employed on 9/11, the CIA has been working overtime trying to knock the story down.
The defectors weren't credible, Agency sources repeatedly told reporters.
"The probability that the training provided at such centers, e.g. Salman Pak, was similar to what al Qaida could offer at its own camps in Afghanistan, combined with the sourcing difficulties, leads us to conclude that we need additional corroboration before we can validate that this low level basic terrorist training for al Qaida occurred in Iraq," one CIA analyst told Knight Ridder news in January 2003.
Four months later, U.S. Marines overran the super secret facility that the Agency had dismissed as innocuous.
On April 6, 2003, CENTCOM spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, told reporters that the Iraqis defending the camp were not run of the mill soldiers.
"The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," Brooks said.
"Some of them come from Sudan, some from Egypt, some from other places . . . It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations," the CENTCOM spokesman added.
The CIA's response? Certainly not the kind of intelligence review that would have gotten to the bottom of just what was going on at Salman Pak. In fact, at last report, the Agency accepted the alibi offered by Iraqi officials: that hijack classes staged aboard a parked airliner were actually hijack prevention exercises.
The Agency reacted the same way when Czech intelligence reported that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just months before the 9/11 attacks, dismissing the claim despite repeated Czech assertions that it was true.
And when the London Telegraph reported in Dec. 2003 that the interim Iraqi government had uncovered a document that put Mr. Atta in Baghdad in July 2001, anonymous U.S. intelligence sources told Newsweek the document was a probable forgery, citing an Iraqi document expert who hadn't laid eyes on the paper in question.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, sounded thoroughly impressed by the discovery, telling the Telegraph:
"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.'"
Perhaps the CIA has conducted thorough behind-the-scenes investigations of each one of these episodes - and has simply decided not to go public with its smoking gun evidence debunking the claims. But there's nothing to that effect on the public record.
The 9/11 Commission claims to have conclusively determined that Saddam played no role whatsoever in 9/11. But like the CIA, the Commission has earned a reputation for ignoring important and compelling evidence - by burying key testimony that Mohamed Atta had been tracked down by the Able Danger intelligence group before the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, in the only legal test of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 - a May 8, 2003 ruling by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer awarded two 9/11 families $104 million based on what Baer said was Iraq's "material" role in the attacks.
What's more, Oil for Food sleuth Claudia Rosett has offered a compelling, albeit circumstantial, case that Osama bin Laden didn't have the financial wherewithal to bankroll the 9/11 operation while simultaneously underwriting al Qaeda's worldwide network - until Saddam began pouring some of his Oil for Food profits into terrorist coffers.
Though even the Bush administration now treats the theory as hearsay, there remains a substantial body of evidence that suggests Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
And almost none of it has been credibly debunked by the CIA or other U.S. intelligence gathers, who offer only unsupported claims that the evidence in question is unreliable.
The Leakgate imbroglio has put the spotlight on the CIA's opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq war policy - with questions swirling about who at the agency thought it was a good idea to send Bush-bashing war critic Joe Wilson to verify key administration claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions.
But the Agency's double-dealing on evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction begs another question: Was the CIA an honest broker of information that seemed, early on, to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks?
Longtime Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing - who drafted the 1982 law that was supposed to be at the center of the Leakgate scandal - has been arguing for weeks now that the CIA's permanent bureaucracy had a hidden agenda against the Iraq war.
Writing on OpinionJournal.com on Sunday, Toensing went so far as to suggest that the CIA's decision to enlist Wilson is beginning to look like "a brilliant covert action against the White House."
Was a similar strategy employed whenever inconvenient evidence materialized linking Iraq to 9/11?
Since two Iraqi defectors first reported in Nov. 2001 that radical Islamists had been trained at Saddam's Salman Pak terrorist camp to hijack airplanes using techniques similar to those employed on 9/11, the CIA has been working overtime trying to knock the story down.
The defectors weren't credible, Agency sources repeatedly told reporters.
"The probability that the training provided at such centers, e.g. Salman Pak, was similar to what al Qaida could offer at its own camps in Afghanistan, combined with the sourcing difficulties, leads us to conclude that we need additional corroboration before we can validate that this low level basic terrorist training for al Qaida occurred in Iraq," one CIA analyst told Knight Ridder news in January 2003.
Four months later, U.S. Marines overran the super secret facility that the Agency had dismissed as innocuous.
On April 6, 2003, CENTCOM spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, told reporters that the Iraqis defending the camp were not run of the mill soldiers.
"The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," Brooks said.
"Some of them come from Sudan, some from Egypt, some from other places . . . It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations," the CENTCOM spokesman added.
The CIA's response? Certainly not the kind of intelligence review that would have gotten to the bottom of just what was going on at Salman Pak. In fact, at last report, the Agency accepted the alibi offered by Iraqi officials: that hijack classes staged aboard a parked airliner were actually hijack prevention exercises.
The Agency reacted the same way when Czech intelligence reported that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just months before the 9/11 attacks, dismissing the claim despite repeated Czech assertions that it was true.
And when the London Telegraph reported in Dec. 2003 that the interim Iraqi government had uncovered a document that put Mr. Atta in Baghdad in July 2001, anonymous U.S. intelligence sources told Newsweek the document was a probable forgery, citing an Iraqi document expert who hadn't laid eyes on the paper in question.
Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, sounded thoroughly impressed by the discovery, telling the Telegraph:
"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.'"
Perhaps the CIA has conducted thorough behind-the-scenes investigations of each one of these episodes - and has simply decided not to go public with its smoking gun evidence debunking the claims. But there's nothing to that effect on the public record.
The 9/11 Commission claims to have conclusively determined that Saddam played no role whatsoever in 9/11. But like the CIA, the Commission has earned a reputation for ignoring important and compelling evidence - by burying key testimony that Mohamed Atta had been tracked down by the Able Danger intelligence group before the 9/11 attacks.
Meanwhile, in the only legal test of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 - a May 8, 2003 ruling by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer awarded two 9/11 families $104 million based on what Baer said was Iraq's "material" role in the attacks.
What's more, Oil for Food sleuth Claudia Rosett has offered a compelling, albeit circumstantial, case that Osama bin Laden didn't have the financial wherewithal to bankroll the 9/11 operation while simultaneously underwriting al Qaeda's worldwide network - until Saddam began pouring some of his Oil for Food profits into terrorist coffers.
Though even the Bush administration now treats the theory as hearsay, there remains a substantial body of evidence that suggests Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks.
And almost none of it has been credibly debunked by the CIA or other U.S. intelligence gathers, who offer only unsupported claims that the evidence in question is unreliable.
