It’s December 14, 2003, the day Paul Bremer announced Saddam’s capture to the world. Despite the euphoria surrounding the nabbing of the Butcher of Baghdad, the White House has a few niggling problems. David Kay is about a month away from telling Congress, “we were all wrong” about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction. John Ashcroft is two weeks away from assigning Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the outing of Valerie Plame in the Niger document scandal. And, on top of these problems, investigators pouring over Iraqi intelligence documents have found no evidence of a working relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
No WMD, no link to al-Qaeda, no flowers and chocolate, and a deadly insurgency are putting Bush’s re-election prospects in danger. Enter Ayad Allawi, a former CIA agent. He suddenly discovers a document that kills two birds with one stone. News of the document breaks in the then Conrad Black owned UK Telegraph. Somewhat astonishingly, the document simultaneously provides proof that lead-hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Iraq in 2001 and received training and that Iraq had actually received uranium from Africa.
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.”
However, the document is far from compelling. It is preposterous on its face and no U.S. media will touch it. That is, until the highly respected William Safire seized on it as the smoking gun that proves Saddam was behind 9/11.
On Saturday night, I stuffed myself on lamb chops and potato pancakes at a holiday party at the home of Don and Joyce Rumsfeld. Along with other media bigfeet, I chatted up Rummy and C.I.A. chief George Tenet, both of whom were in on the secret of the capture of Saddam a few hours before. Neither man even hinted at a thing. So much for being a Washington Insider…
Under interrogation, he’s not likely to rat on his fedayeen, lead us to his hidden billions abroad or tell the truth about dirty dealings with France and Russia. Instead, he intends to lie all the way to martyrdom.
Example: Dr. Ayad Allawi, an Iraqi leader long considered reliable by intelligence agencies, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph last week that a memo has been found from Saddam’s secret police chief to the dictator dated July 1, 2001, reporting that the veteran terrorist Abu Nidal had been training one Mohamed Atta in Baghdad. Nobody disputes that a few months after Atta’s 9/11 suicide mission, Nidal was permanently silenced by Saddam’s police, the only “suicide” to be found with four bullets in his head.
The prisoner will surely dispute all connections to Al Qaeda, along with charges that he ordered the deaths of what Tony Blair now estimates as 400,000 Shiite and Kurdish Muslims in Iraq.
This embarrassing episode is only the most flagrant attempt we’ve seen at psychological operations. We have been subjected to long stream of them, especially with regard to the terrorist everyman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In October 2005, the government announced that they had intercepted a letter from al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri to al-Zarqawi. There was only one problem. The end of the letter stated:
“My greetings to all the loved ones and please give me news of Karem and the rest of the folks I know…And especially, by God, if by chance you’re going to Falluja, send greetings to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” it states.
It was staggeringly stupid for the government to try to pass of this piece of rank propaganda as a letter to Zarqawi when it contained the above sentence. The letter also made reference to Imam Hussain, something no Sunni jihadist would be likely to do, since they see the Shi’a reverence for Hussain as idolatry.
Let’s not forget another example, this time from 2004. This was a little story broken by Dexter Filkins and Doulas Jehl of the New York Times. But, once again, it was William Safire that seized on it in a column headlined Found: Smoking Gun:
In the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga.
That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a ”clear link” between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.
The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to Al Qaeda the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements. The Kurds turned him over to Americans for further interrogation, which is proving fruitful.
The Times reporter Dexter Filkins in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages’ authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, ”We couldn’t make this up if we tried.”
The author of the lengthy Ansar-to-Qaeda electronic message is suspected of being the most wanted terror operative in the world today: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, long familiar to readers of this space as ”the man with the limp,” who personifies the link of Ansar and Al Qaeda.
You can judge for yourselves about the likelihood of this CD-ROM story, but it was an effort to tie al-Qaeda to the Iraqi insurgency…and soon after the media would begin referring to Zarqawi’s group as “al-Qaeda in Iraq”. You see, if there was no connection before the war, there certainly was a connection after.
It’s hard to believe that the U.S. government would engage in psychological operations of this magnitude on the U.S. citizenry, but that is exactly what they have done and continue to do. Too many in the media are complicit, or fail to call the administration on their lies. But, this is the prism through which we should view all proclamations issuing from this administration. For example, the story that terrorists were trying to blow up the Holland Tunnel and flood Wall Street was quickly rendered inoperative by the laws of physics. Today, the plan was changed to an effort to blow up the PATH tubes, and not for the purpose of flooding. How should we view this information?
One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.
“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere – are indeed extremists,” their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.
“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed,” Giraldi added. “Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”
Two other intelligence officials with experience in the field on extremist operations concurred–and expressed concern that what could have been an operation to eventually track known extremists (should they eventually make actual contact with funds and training,) seems to have been exposed for political gain.
Some see this latest “ploy” as a direct challenge to a New York Times report this week of the disbandment of Alec Station, the CIA unit responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden since before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
If you want a better understanding of what we are witnessing, at least in my opinion, you should go back and look at the words of former Homeland Security Director, Tom Ridge:
The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or “high” risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.
His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation’s homeland security apparatus.
Ridge said he wanted to “debunk the myth” that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.
“More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it,” Ridge told reporters. “Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert). … There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?’ “
There are many more examples of the administration hyping the threat of terrorism, or hyping the significance of the arrest of ‘terrorists’. Abu Zabaydah is now decribed as a schizophrenic rather than a mastermind of al-qaeda. The much touted Lackawanna terror group turned out to be a bunch of dumb kids. Jose Padilla was never charged with any of the original crimes ascribed to him. The list can go on and on.
The bottom line is that conservatives have bought this propaganda hook, line, and sinker, and never seem to notice or care that they have been duped. Duped on Pat Tillman, duped on Jessica Lynch, duped on Saddam’s spiderhole.
I don’t mean to make people cynical. But cynicism is required when the government and media continue to pass off propaganda about the threats, the connections, and the successes of the so-called global war on terrorism.
