Barot’s arrest resulted in the Department of Homeland Security elevating the threat level to the orange “high” risk category for the financial services sectors in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., on August 1, 2004, despite the fact that there was absolutely no indication that the plot was anything other than historical. The raising of the unnecessary alert to orange in the final months of the tight presidential campaign between Bush and John Kerry obviously did not hurt the “strong on terrorism” president.
Bush’s homeland security adviser Fran Townsend says that she “knew to be concerned that our motives would be questioned, and I worked incredibly hard to get hold of the Kerry campaign and brief them before it went public. I insisted that we reach out to them, that they not get blindsided, because I knew Kerry was going to be out in public and was going to get asked about it. I did not want him to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
The alert was lowered only on November 10, a week after the election campaign was over.
Chapter 9
Building the Case for War with Iraq
How are nations ruled and led into war? Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print.
—Austrian journalist Karl Kraus,
explaining the causes of World War I
You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
—Senator Patrick Moynihan
In the spring of 1997, I traveled to eastern Afghanistan for CNN to produce Osama bin Laden’s first television interview, during the course of which the Saudi militant told a Western audience for the first time that he was launching a holy war against the United States. After the formal interview was over, the correspondent Peter Arnett asked bin Laden what he thought about Saddam Hussein, a subject that wasn’t then freighted with any of the significance it would later come to have. Bin Laden replied that Saddam was not sufficiently Islamic and had invaded Kuwait in 1990 for his own aggrandizement, statements with which few could disagree.
What bin Laden told us in 1997 represented his unvarnished opinion of Saddam, a view from which he did not later waver. And there is no subsequent evidence that al-Qaeda and Saddam had anything but the most distant and frigid of relationships. However, following the 9/11 attacks the American public became convinced that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in league. By September 2003, six months into the war with Iraq, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was implicated in the attacks on New York and Washington, despite the fact that there was not a shred of evidence that this was the case. Even five years later, more than a quarter of Americans continued to believe that Saddam had had a personal role in 9/11, showing how effective Bush administration efforts to link the Iraqi dictator to the attacks had continued to be.
Why were Americans persuaded that there was an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden? Just as faulty intelligence and exaggerated claims by Bush officials made the case for a dangerous and threatening Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, a case that went largely unchallenged by a pliant media, the same set of factors also allowed the Bush administration to create a useful myth: that there was a substantial connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The widespread belief that there was an al-Qaeda–Iraq alliance was a necessary precondition to create the public consensus to go to war in Iraq because Saddam’s supposed WMD programs were, of themselves, not enough to threaten American security. Even if the most exaggerated claims about Saddam’s WMD capabilities were in fact true, those weapons posed no threat to the United States because Saddam did not possess the ballistic missile systems to deliver them to American targets. For Saddam to present a threat to the United States you had to make the case that Saddam was in league with terrorists including bin Laden and that he might give WMD to a group like al-Qaeda, which would then deploy them against the United States.
Myriad variations of that argument were presented by Bush officials as a pressing reason to go to war against Iraq. A year after 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that there was “bulletproof” evidence of an Iraq–al-Qaeda connection. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”
Despite the many statements of Bush officials positing an al-Qaeda–Iraq axis, and a raft of stories in the media that seemed to confirm such an alliance, an examination of the historical record demonstrates that while al-Qaeda members and Iraqi officials had some limited contacts during the mid-1990s, there were never any outcomes from those discussions. There is also no evidence that Saddam and al-Qaeda ever cooperated in any specific act of terrorism, nor that Iraq funded al-Qaeda. The evidence that Saddam passed WMD material or know-how to bin Laden’s men is also nonexistent.
Of course, the fact that Saddam, a secular dictator, and bin Laden, an Islamist zealot, were ideologically opposed does not mean they might not have cooperated with each other. The question is, did bin Laden’s ideological antipathy for Saddam ever diminish to the point that al-Qaeda entered into anything resembling a marriage of convenience with the Iraqi dictator? Among the reasons that suggest such an accommodation was implausible was the fact that bin Laden had been an antagonist of Saddam for many years. “A year before Hussein entered Kuwait,” bin Laden recalled in the 1997 CNN interview, “I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf. No one believed me. I distributed many tapes in Saudi Arabia.” Khaled Batarfi remembers his childhood friend delivering those same warnings about Saddam to a salon of intellectuals in Mecca six months before his armies invaded Kuwait on August 1, 1990. Bin Laden told the group, “We should train our people, our young, and increase our army and prepare for the day when eventually we are attacked. This guy [Saddam] can never be trusted.”
As we have seen, after Saddam’s forces invaded Kuwait, bin Laden immediately volunteered the services of his “holy warriors,” who had recently returned from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, to defend Saudi Arabia. The fact that bin Laden was willing to lead his own troops into battle against Saddam hardly suggested a desire to ally himself with the Iraqi dictator—rather, it underlined the contempt that bin Laden had long felt for him.
Bin Laden’s visceral dislike of the Baathist secular socialism of Saddam’s regime did not abate over the years. Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who has interviewed the Saudi terrorist a number of times, says that when he interviewed bin Laden in the late 1990s the al-Qaeda leader passionately condemned Saddam, saying, “The land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother.”
Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda members were certainly in contact while the terrorist group was headquartered in Sudan between 1991 and 1996. Cofer Black, the CIA’s station chief in Sudan during the mid-1990s, says, “I’m personally aware of contacts between Iraq and members of al-Qaeda. The real question is the comprehensiveness of this. Was there holding of hands? You betcha.” This is hardly surprising. The then de facto ruler of Sudan, Hassan Turabi, was closely allied to Saddam, while he was also playing host to terrorist groups from around the Middle East. But al-Qaeda’s desultory contacts with Iraqi officials stopped after bin Laden’s departure from Sudan for Afghanistan in May 1996. Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official who served at the National Security Council under President Clinton, says, “I don’t recall any intelligence reporting of Iraqis going to Afghanistan or vice versa, and if there was such reporting it was never deemed credible.” However, in October 2002, CIA director George Tenet wrote a letter to Senator Bob Graham, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that the CIA had “solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.” This was a seriously misleading construction. The contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq did date back a decade, but they did not continue past the mid-1990s.
The investigation into the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, a
t the time the largest overseas investigation ever mounted, found no Iraqi connection. The investigation into the USS Cole attack found no evidence of Iraqi complicity. And the most wide-ranging criminal inquiry in history, involving chasing down half a million leads and interviewing 167,000 people, uncovered no Iraq link to 9/11. The congressional intelligence committees and the bipartisan 9/11 inquiry that exhaustively investigated the attacks on the Trade Center and Pentagon also found no Iraqi connection. In September 2003, more than two years after the attacks, even President Bush himself tersely conceded for the first time that there was “no evidence” that Saddam played any role in the 9/11 atrocities.
Yet the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States was an article of faith within the Bush administration, a conviction that was successfully sold to the American public and then embroiled the United States in a costly war in Iraq, so it’s fair to ask: Where did this faith come from?
An important element of that faith originated with the research of an obscure academic named Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie possessed an array of credentials that appeared to certify her as an expert on the Middle East and Iraq. She had held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War College and had served as some kind of adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. Until this point there was little controversial about Mylroie’s career. That would change with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the first time that a group of jihadist terrorists had struck inside the United States. The Trade Center attack would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam’s regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against the United States. Mylroie laid out her case for Iraqi involvement in the 1993 attack in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, a book published a year before 9/11 by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the right-wing think tank.
It was not an accident that the AEI published Mylroie’s book, since it was at the AEI in particular that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy. Neoconservative hawks such as Richard Perle, a key architect of President Bush’s get-tough-on Iraq policy, had a long association with AEI. Still, not one of the thinker/operatives at AEI, or indeed any of the other Iraq hawks such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, was in any real way an expert on the country or had served in the region. Moreover, the majority of those in and out of government who were Middle East experts had grave concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq and serious doubts about claims that Saddam’s regime posed an urgent threat to American security. What, then, gave neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Perle such abiding faith in their own positions?
A good deal of their certainty came from Mylroie’s findings that Saddam was the central source of anti-American terrorism going back a decade. Study of Revenge makes it clear that Mylroie and the neoconservatives worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as “splendid and wholly convincing.” I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, later Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, was thanked in the acknowledgments for his “generous and timely assistance.” Wolfowitz was also instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: “At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult,” Mylroie wrote.
None of this was out of the ordinary, except for the fact that Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast terrorist conspiracy against the United States against virtually all evidence and expert opinion. In what amounted to the discovery of a unified-field theory of terrorism, Mylroie wrote that Saddam was not only behind the 1993 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 to the attack on the USS Cole two years later.
Mylroie’s influence could be seen in the Bush cabinet’s reaction to 9/11. As we have seen, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush, and Cheney immediately jumped to the conclusion that Saddam was implicated. This was far from an obvious conclusion to arrive at, as every significant anti-American terror attack of the past decade had been the work of the al-Qaeda network, while the U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism office had concluded in its comprehensive, yearly report for 2000 that “[Iraq] has not attempted an anti-Western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait.” In other words, it was the official conclusion of the U.S. government by the time of the 9/11 attacks that Iraq had not been involved in any anti-American terrorism for almost a decade.
Why was it then that key members of the Bush administration believed that Iraq had been deeply involved in anti-American terrorism for many years? For that we must turn in more detail to Laurie Mylroie, who claimed to have discovered something that everyone else had missed: that the mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center plot, a man generally known by one of his many aliases, “Ramzi Yousef,” was an Iraqi intelligence agent. Mylroie wrote that sometime after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Yousef assumed the identity of a Pakistani whose family lived in Kuwait, named Abdul Basit, in order to disguise his real identity as an Iraqi agent. Mylroie came to that deduction following an examination of Abdul Basit’s passport records and her discovery that Yousef and Abdul Basit were apparently four inches different in height. On such wafer-thin pieces of “evidence” Mylroie built her case that Yousef must have therefore been an Iraqi agent and that therefore Iraq had masterminded the 1993 Trade Center attack. However, U.S. investigators had long ago found that the man Mylroie described as an Iraqi agent was in fact a Pakistani born in Kuwait who had ties to al-Qaeda. The FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack.
It is possible, of course, that the neoconservatives did not find Mylroie’s research to be genuinely persuasive, but rather that her findings simply fit conveniently with their own desire to overthrow Saddam. But there are reasons to think that they actually were persuaded by her research. Given that she was the one member of the neoconservative team with any real credentials on Iraq, Mylroie’s opinions would naturally have carried special weight. That she was a genuine authority, whose “research” confirmed their worst fears about Saddam, could only have strengthened their convictions.
After 9/11, Wolfowitz pressed top Justice Department officials to declare Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first Trade Center attack, who was jailed in Colorado, an “enemy combatant.” This would have allowed Yousef to be transferred from federal prison into U.S. military custody. Wolfowitz apparently believed such a move might get Yousef to finally confess that he was indeed an Iraqi intelligence agent. Wolfowitz’s request was turned down by Justice officials. A veteran CIA official specializing in al-Qaeda said that throughout late 2002 and early 2003 he and his colleagues were constantly being asked to provide briefings to Bush administration officials about Mylroie’s theory that both the 9/11 operational commander Khalid Sheih Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef were Iraqi agents.
On July 8, 2003, Mylroie appeared as an “expert witness” before the 9/11 Commission. She testified: “There is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the 1993 and 2001 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents.” Mylroie explained that this had not been discovered by the U.S. government because “a senior administration official told me in specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism.” We were expected to believe that the Bush administration officials whom Mylroie knew so well could not find anyone in intelligence or law enforcement to investigate the supposed Iraqi intelligence background of the mastermind of 9/11, at the same time that 150,000 American soldiers had just been sent to fight a war in Iraq under the banner of the war on terrorism.
Saddam was guilty of many crimes, not least t
he genocidal policies he unleashed on the Marsh Arabs, Shia, and Kurds of Iraq, but there is no evidence linking him to acts of anti-American terrorism since the failed 1993 attempt to assassinate President George H. W. Bush in Kuwait. Unfortunately, Mylroie’s research proved to be more than merely academic, as her theories swayed key opinion makers in the Bush administration, who then managed to persuade seven out of ten Americans that the Iraqi dictator had a role in the attacks on Washington and New York. So Mylroie’s specious theories of Iraq’s involvement in anti-American terrorism became part of the zeitgeist in the United States and were an important factor in leading America into the costly war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, in November 2003, Mylroie observed: “I take satisfaction in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details.” Now she tells us.
A few weeks after 9/11, Mike Maloof, a Defense Department official who specialized in high-tech export controls, was asked by Douglas Feith, the number-three official at the Pentagon, to investigate the exact nature of the supposed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection. Maloof, who had worked for Richard Perle in Reagan’s Defense Department together with David Wurmser, a neoconservative scholar known for his close ties to the Israeli right, set up a two-man office at the Pentagon known as the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG), which reported to Feith.
Both Feith and Wurmser were longtime advocates of overthrowing Saddam. Together with Richard Perle, in 1996 they even wrote a position paper for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that made the bizarre suggestion that Israel should encourage the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan “to control Iraq.” In 1999, Wurmser, then at the American Enterprise Institute, had written a book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, which argued that Saddam’s fortunes had revived since the mid-1990s after the U.S. government had withdrawn its backing from the neoconservatives’ favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, and his Iraqi National Congress. Wurmser, who subsequently became Dick Cheney’s Middle East expert, was hardly a disinterested observer when it came to reviewing the case for the connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam.
The Longest War Page 18