That Bush was citing the incident nine years later to explain his current policy made some members of Congress uncomfortable. House Majority Leader Dick Armey later said he had “just cringed” when he read about the president’s comment. “Wow,” he remarked to his wife, “I hope that’s not what this is all about.”
At one point, other members of Congress were able to witness Bush’s intense feelings about Saddam up close. At a breakfast with a few congressional leaders in late September, Bush expressed exasperation when the issue of a diplomatic settlement arose. Saddam had shown his contempt for the United States, he told the legislators. There was no use talking to him. “Do you want to know what the foreign policy of Iraq is to the United States?” Bush asked angrily. The president then answered his own question by raising his middle finger and thrusting it inches in front of Senator Daschle’s face, according to a witness. “Fuck the United States!” Bush continued. “That’s what it is—and that’s why we’re going to get him!”*22
BUT on Capitol Hill, the White House needed to make a case with evidence, not emotion. One critical hearing—a classified session—took place on September 24 for members of the Senate foreign relations committee. Tenet was the star witness, and Robert Walpole, the agency’s national intelligence officer for nuclear weapons, had brought along a prop: one of the aluminum tubes. During the session, Tenet pushed the tubes case and presented other disturbing intelligence: Saddam had a fleet of mobile biological weapons labs and had been developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could be outfitted with chemical or biological agents. After listening to Tenet, Senator Joe Biden, the Democratic chairman of the committee, had the impression, as he later said, that these drones “could be put on oil tankers off the coast of the United States and fly into Philadelphia or Charleston [South Carolina] carrying chemical and biological weapons and hit with devastating effects.” It was scary stuff—death labs on wheels, direct WMD attacks on America.
But when Biden and other committee members pressed Tenet on the sourcing for these claims, they got little in the way of answers. During the questioning, a committee staff member slipped Biden a note with a suggested query, and Biden put this question to Tenet: What “technically collected” evidence did the CIA have of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? What the staffer had in mind was physical proof: radioactive emissions from nuclear sites, electronic intercepts, samples of biological agents. Anything that would be hard and irrefutable.
“None, Senator,” Tenet replied.
There was a hush in the room. Oh my God, the staffer thought. “ ‘None, Senator’—that answer will ring in my ears as long as I live,” the aide remarked later. Biden appeared bothered. He asked Tenet, “George, do you want me to clear the staff out of the room?” It was a way of asking if Tenet possessed superclassified information, some technical evidence that was so black, so secret, that it couldn’t be shared with staffers.
“There’s no reason to, Senator,” Tenet replied, signaling that he wasn’t holding anything back.
Tenet did insist that the CIA had solid human sources—strong reporting from defectors who had seen the mobile labs, reliable reporting on the UAVs. There was, Tenet said, nothing to be concerned about regarding the CIA’s sourcing. Shortly after this exchange, Tenet left the hearing, explaining that he had to attend his son’s basketball games. (Biden complimented him for having his priorities straight.) Some senators also began to slowly file out of the room.
But the hearing wasn’t done. The committee had previously learned of the dispute within the government about the aluminum tubes, and Biden had invited witnesses to represent the skeptics. The State Department’s chief intelligence officer, Carl Ford, Jr., was there to testify after Tenet, as was Rhys Williams, the chief of the Energy Department’s Office of Intelligence. Both witnesses told the dwindling number of senators that their agencies didn’t accept the tubes argument. But few senators were paying close attention to their testimony, and the hearing was petering out. “These dissents,” another staffer present said, “were not front and center.”
Peter Zimmerman, the committee’s scientific adviser, left the closed-door meeting enraged. A former Pentagon contractor who specialized in nuclear technology, Zimmerman had drafted a report on nuclear centrifuges for the Defense Department in the late 1990s. As soon as he had heard about the aluminum tubes case, he had been doubtful. He had pored over the specifications of the tubes and had decided that they were too small to be used for centrifuges. After the hearing, he confronted Walpole. “Let’s see your toy,” he said, referring to the aluminum tube. Walpole took it out. The item looked like an aluminum sewer pipe. Zimmerman was not impressed; he grilled Walpole on assorted technical details. None of Walpole’s answers was convincing. Walpole, Zimmerman thought, didn’t understand the crucial technical issues. And Zimmerman was underwhelmed by almost everything else Tenet had said to the committee.
“I remember going home that night,” he recalled, “and practically putting my fist through the wall half a dozen times. I was as frustrated as I’ve ever been. I remember saying to my wife, ‘They’re going to war and there’s not a damn piece of evidence to substantiate it.’ ”
JUST about this time, administration officials began referring to intelligence reports that contained a dramatic new assertion: Saddam had already provided weapons training to al-Qaeda. On September 25, Condoleezza Rice appeared on PBS’s NewsHour and said the Iraqi tyrant was supplying “training to al-Qaeda in chemical weapons development.” The next day, Ari Fleischer pointed reporters to Rice’s comments at the White House press briefing. On September 26, Rumsfeld said that there was “reliable reporting” of “possible chemical- and biological-agent training,” and the following day he declared that the evidence of Saddam–al-Qaeda ties was “bullet-proof.” This was not a Feith-like charge based on fuzzy past “associations” and “contacts.” This seemed to be founded on fresh and solid intelligence: the Iraqi dictator was instructing the murderers of al-Qaeda in the use of weapons of mass death. Here was the connection—what Wolfowitz, Feith, Mylroie and others had obsessed over—in its most frightening manifestation.
The source of this allegation was the account of one man: a captured al-Qaeda commander named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. His name was never mentioned publicly. Nor was an important part of the story: that some U.S. intelligence analysts doubted his claims and some FBI officials worried he might have provided an invented tale under torture.
After al-Libi was picked up by Pakistani security forces on December 19, 2001, the FBI quickly identified him as a major al-Qaeda figure—the highest-ranking operative yet apprehended. Al-Libi—whose real name was Ali Abdul Aziz al-Fakhiri—was from Libya but had spent considerable time in Syria, where he had studied engineering. He emigrated to Afghanistan and, according to U.S. officials, became a bomb maker. He was then the chief of bin Laden’s Khalden training camp, in charge of preparing hundreds of fighters to wage jihad in the West.
Taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan after his capture, al-Libi was handed over to two FBI agents from New York. The agents worked him hard. One of them, Russell Fincher, bonded with al-Libi, roping him in with a simple question: Do you pray? Of course, al-Libi replied. So did Fincher, a devout Christian. So they prayed together—and talked about faith and God, Jesus and Mohammed. Fincher and a colleague spent more than eighty hours with the al-Qaeda commander, talking religion, sipping coffee, playing to his ego, winning his trust. Fincher’s basic view of interrogations was that no matter what horrible crimes your captives may have committed, they’re still human beings. Treat them with respect, and you’re likely to get a lot more out of them. The message was reinforced by his boss in New York, Jack Cloonan, a tough-talking, veteran FBI counterterrorism supervisor, who instructed Fincher to read al-Libi his rights and treat him exactly the way he would if he had picked him up on the streets of Brooklyn. That way, Cloonan explained, any confession al-Libi made, or any evidence he provided, could be used in an Amer
ican court of law.
The tactics worked. Al-Libi began to open up. The agents started filing reports to the FBI in New York. Al-Libi identified two trainees at his camp who were of keen interest to the bureau: Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be al-Qaeda pilot arrested in Minneapolis a few weeks before 9/11, and Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber recently arrested in Boston after he failed to ignite an explosive device on a transatlantic flight. The Justice Department was preparing cases against both men. Al-Libi, who seemed intent on cutting a deal, might be of use in those prosecutions. “He was giving us good information,” recalled Cloonan, who reviewed Fincher’s reports.
Fincher also questioned al-Libi closely about any al-Qaeda dealings with foreign governments. The al-Qaeda commander made no reference to any contacts with Saddam’s regime. This was consistent with the message the FBI was getting from every other al-Qaeda captive it was questioning during this period. While al-Qaeda detainees did acknowledge ties to officials in some countries—such as Sudan and Pakistan—they denied having worked with Saddam. “It was always, ‘No, no no,’ ” recalled Cloonan.
After a few days of interrogations, the FBI was convinced al-Libi could be a gold mine. But the CIA had a different view. Agency officials suspected al-Libi was holding out and might know of ongoing al-Qaeda operations that he wasn’t revealing. CIA officials wanted control of al-Libi, and they were determined to get it.
In the intelligence community, few issues at the time were more contentious than the question of whether the CIA or the FBI should be in charge of interrogating al-Qaeda suspects arrested overseas or picked up in Afghanistan. Al-Libi became a test case. Tenet raised the issue at the White House—and won. At the time, the FBI was in no position to resist. The widespread perception (not entirely accurate) was that the bureau, not the CIA, had been primarily responsible for the intelligence failures leading to the September 11 attacks. And Tenet, with his cigars and tough talk, had bonded with Bush and displayed an aggressiveness that impressed the president. FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was much stiffer than Tenet, was new on the job. “We didn’t have the political juice with the president,” a senior FBI official subsequently said. “It was the agency that ruled the roost.” The White House ordered that al-Libi be handed over to the CIA.
One day, before the FBI lost control of the suspect, a CIA officer at Bagram entered the cell where al-Libi was being held and interrupted one of Fincher’s interrogations. He shouted at the prisoner, trying to intimidate him. He would be sent to Egypt, the CIA officer told him. Then he whispered in his ear: “When you’re in Egypt, I’m going to find your mother and fuck her.” Fincher heard the remark and later relayed it to Cloonan. Not long afterward, the CIA man returned with military personnel. In the presence of Fincher, they had the suspect removed. “They literally came into the room, strapped him to a stretcher, and wrapped his feet, his hands, and his mouth in duct tape,” said a senior FBI official. A hood was placed over his head. The stretcher with al-Libi was then loaded into a pickup truck, which drove right onto a cargo plane that promptly took off. “The fucking guy just disappeared,” said another top FBI agent. “We were pissed.”
Al-Libi was flown to Egypt. He had fallen into the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. Started by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in the 1990s to deal with recalcitrant terror suspects, this program had been expanded substantially after 9/11. Terror suspects were whisked away to allied countries—primarily Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco—where interrogation methods were known to be brutal and nasty. Once the program attracted publicity two years later, Bush and other senior administration officials would repeatedly say the United States did not engage in torture and did not send suspects to countries where they might be tortured. Yet the State Department’s own human rights report for Egypt in 2001 reported there were “numerous credible reports” of torture by Egyptian security forces that year, especially regarding prisoners suspected of terrorism. Among the methods cited: “Being stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks and doused with cold water.” CIA officials would later say that they had been assured by the Egyptians that nothing improper was done to al-Libi while he was in their custody. Cloonan years later said his concerns were heightened when a U.S. military officer told him that al-Libi had been subjected to a particularly diabolical interrogation technique: a “mock burial” in which the prisoner is thrown into a hole that is gradually filled with dirt, causing him to believe that he is about to be buried alive.
Whatever happened to al-Libi while he was in Egyptian custody—and there has never been a public investigation—within a few weeks he changed his story about Saddam and al-Qaeda. He told his interrogators something he had not said to the FBI agents in Bagram. Bin Laden, he now claimed, had been frustrated by his inability to develop his own chemical and biological weapons capacity. So he had dispatched two operatives to Iraq for chemical and biological weapons training.
Intelligence reports about al-Libi’s distressing claim—a chemical and biological weapons partnership between Saddam and bin Laden—were soon being sent to the White House. Though the CIA had resisted the Mylroie-Feith-Wolfowitz connect-the-dots theory of an alliance between Baghdad and bin Laden, in this case the agency had a direct report from a senior al-Qaeda operative in custody—even if the report was unconfirmed. It was at least something that CIA officials could circulate that appeared to substantiate the al-Qaeda–Iraq connection that was consuming influential administration officials.
Yet from the outset, there was also skepticism within the U.S. intelligence community. A February 2002 memo written by an analyst for the DIA noted that al-Libi “lacks specific details on the Iraqis involved, the CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear] materials associated with the assistance, and the location where training occurred.” The analyst added that “it is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers. Ibn al-Shaykh [al-Libi] has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knew will retain their interest.”
The analyst was not only casting doubt on the al-Libi reporting; he was suggesting that the al-Qaeda captive may only have been telling his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear, perhaps to get them to stop whatever aggressive interrogation techniques they were using. This was exactly why the FBI in the post-9/11 period had argued against the use of torture or other degrading interrogation techniques (particularly at the Guantánamo detention center, where FBI agents often clashed with military intelligence on this issue). Leave aside the human rights issues; you can never trust what you’re getting, FBI officials asserted. The DIA analyst who authored the memo also cited an additional reason to question al-Libi’s claims: “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”
The DIA analyst was adhering to the commonsense view held by most of the U.S. counterterrorism community. Why would Saddam pass along his chemical and biological know-how—presumably his most cherished possessions—to a terrorist group that owed its allegiance to someone else? For years, bin Laden had railed about “apostate” Arab states led by “infidel” leaders who failed to follow the words of the Prophet. Saddam was clearly one such leader. His secular Baathist regime would have to fall for bin Laden to achieve his goal of a new Islamic caliphate. “I never thought Saddam was crazy,” said Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst who once headed the bin Laden unit. “He was never going to give these guys weapons—because al-Qaeda would have been just as likely to use them against him as they would against the United States. They hated Saddam.”
But the DIA’s dissent never registered. At a critical moment in the Iraq debate—in late September—top administration officials such as Rice an
d Rumsfeld publicly exploited al-Libi’s dubious tale to build support for the president’s Iraq resolution. As it turned out, they were relying upon a source who would later recant his entire story. After the invasion of Iraq, al-Libi would again come into the custody of the FBI for a short period, and he would insist that he had told the truth to Russell Fincher the first time around. He would, according to two FBI officials, say of his WMD-training claims, “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”*23
“TRUST me on this, Dick,” Vice President Dick Cheney told House Majority Leader Dick Armey. “When I get done with this briefing, you’re going to be with me.”
It was an afternoon in late September, and Armey had been invited over to the vice president’s small hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol. This was the briefing Bush had promised Armey three weeks earlier. Ever since then, Armey had acceded to the president’s wishes and not said anything in public about his worries about Bush’s stand. But the White House understood Armey’s importance. He was the number two Republican in the House. If he broke ranks, that would be a problem. So Cheney was dispatched to do the job himself.
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