Instead, Republican leaders demagogued 9/11, whipping up the nation’s emotional pain for their own vainglorious ambitions.
Senator John McCain and Vice President Cheney—not the Democrats— played the 9/11 card to incite irrational fears about Saddam’s alleged ties to terrorists. Again and again, top-shelf Republicans paraded on FOX News, making phony demands on Baghdad to ignite public hysteria and ramp up support for War.
On Capitol Hill, I hit back hard—with facts— about our success securing Iraq’s cooperation with U.S. anti-terrorism policy. I called foul.
If Republicans truly believed terrorists were using Iraq as a sanctuary, as they proclaimed on FOX News, an FBI Taskforce on the ground in Baghdad would have provided a strong force of deterrence. In fact, the FBI could have been operating inside Iraq from February, 2001 onwards—nine months before 9/11. Baghdad agreed to this proposal after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October, 2000.
Yet after inventing a phony problem, Senator McCain rejected a valuable tool to address the challenge at a core level.
Likewise, Senator McCain demanded that the FBI must have access to Mr. Al Anai, the Iraqi diplomat who allegedly met 9/11 mastermind, Mohammad Atta in Prague. Once more officials in Baghdad consented to the interview a few hours after McCain issued his demand. I received confirmations myself from an Iraqi delegation visiting the U.N, and communicated Baghdad’s response to the White House on December 2, 2001.
Ignoring the facts, Senator McCain continued to posture for the media. McCain declared the interview with Al Anai to be of paramount importance to the 9/11 investigation. Then he failed to exert his leadership to guarantee the interview would take place, as agreed. That’s more hard evidence of Republican grandstanding after 9/11. It exposes a gross lack of sincerity on national security. And that’s unforgivable.
Worst by far, the Republican Leadership took no action, indeed refused, to close down the financial pipeline feeding Al Qaeda—which I consider the most dangerous and idiotic government decision of this century. Republicans refused to accept banking and financial transactions, because that treasure came from Iraq— which arguably possessed the most valuable intelligence cache on Al Qaeda cells in the whole world. Nobody on the planet tracked jihadi groups as aggressively as Saddam Hussein. Saddam was obsessive in his paranoia. He made it his business to know all of radical Islam’s secrets and hiding places. And Republican leaders refused to take it from him.
Those finances continue to fund global terrorist activities to this very day. Even worse, they finance Taliban operations against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That $3 billion a year from opium sales is used to attack our own soldiers, and undercut a U.S. victory. It’s the single reason why a rag tag army of Afghan mountain fighters has beaten a coalition of 42 NATO nations in a brutal 10 year War, despite the West’s superior weapons and military training.
With its financial empire intact, Afghanistan’s mountain fighters have the where-withal to fight indefinitely.
And yes, I do fear terrorists will deploy those finances in the next attack on the United States—probably moving to advanced planning stages today.
That next strike on U.S. soil will be bigger and badder than anything before, probably a dirty nuclear device targeting the financial district of New York City. On that day, former White House leaders should be “court-martialed,” and stripped of any honoraria and pensions in retirement. They should be forced to bear responsibility for the harm that negligence causes.
No matter what Republicans in Washington promise, it’s too late to change that outcome.
And let me tell you why.
Saddam’s Curse
From the first threats of War, Iraqi diplomats warned that Washington would be gravely disappointed if the U.S expected to invade Baghdad and capture those financial documents through warfare and occupation.
Diplomats stressed that Washington faced a trade off. If the United States embraced Iraq as a global partner against terrorism, Baghdad would hand over those financial records, and we could achieve all of our greatest objectives in the fight against Al Qaeda together. But the converse was also true. In a War with Iraq, America would lose everything that Baghdad could contribute to the War on Terror. All of those financial documents would be destroyed, the intelligence lost forever.
Baghdad had no intention of allowing the United States to profit from both wars.
That threat posed a serious problem when Republicans raced to claim triumph in the War on Terrorism, clinging to national security to placate voters enraged about U.S. failures in Iraq. Republicans projected their own wishful fantasy of success onto a suspiciously unquestioning media.
In fact, they had failed.
The one thing that could have guaranteed absolute victory in the War on Terrorism— the chance to cut off the financial pipeline for Al Qaeda —no longer existed.
Saddam made a bonfire of those documents once bombs started falling on Baghdad. As of February, 2003, diplomats in New York assured me the documents still existed— but not for much longer. At the very end, Iraqi Ministries worked over time shredding documents. It was an irrevocable setback. Those financial documents had been collected covetously over a decade of U.S. embargo, and held as a valuable chit for ending the sanctions. It would be impossible to amass such a historical record ever again.
Oh yes, Saddam played that card strategically. He swore that America could not receive that intelligence outside of a comprehensive resolution of the overall tensions with his country. And I have no doubt that Saddam kept his word.
And so miraculously, that cash pipeline linking global terrorists from the Middle East and Egypt to the Philippines and Indonesia and Afghanistan survived the 9/11 attack, which should have obliterated it. Documents that would have pinpointed early hiding places, so that supply lines could be cut off—and hundreds of millions of dollars seized—all were sacrificed for the vanity of taking down Saddam.
And so it has gone. Any politician in Washington who claims otherwise would be a liar. He would be committing gross leadership fraud against the people.
For those reasons, I believe that effective immediately the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should be purged of all members, Republicans and Democrats alike, on the grounds that Congress has failed abysmally to provide effective oversight of White House activities. Failed oversight has enabled Republican officials to make claims about their performance that went unfulfilled, to the severe detriment of U.S. and global security.
Ironically, oversight is about the only contribution Congress actually makes to anti-terrorism. They give money, and they watch. That’s it. And for all the grand speeches, they could not exert what little authority they have. It was a fiasco.
Finally, I am dismayed that Republican leaders so callously refused to investigate Iraq’s claims about a Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing, which destroyed a nursery school, among others, in the Alfred P. Murrah building. I guess toddlers don’t vote. But until their parents assure me it’s OK to stop hunting Timothy McVeigh’s co-conspirators, I don’t think the Justice Department has a right to ignore this sort of intelligence. It would have spotlighted the Inter-Arab origins of Al Qaeda, which coalesced from several different groups. Inaction was stupid and wasteful. It cost us something precious.
Frankly though, it surprises me. On June 17, 2002, I met with senior staff for Senator Nickles of Oklahoma and Rep. JC Watts of Oklahoma to debrief them on Iraq’s claims.303 Both Nickles and Watts served on the Republican Senate and House Majority Leadership, respectively. Their offices could have launched this investigation on behalf of their own Oklahoma constituents with a single phone call. In fact, I left both offices convinced appropriate actions would be taken immediately.
Low and behold, there was no follow through.
That hurts me on behalf of those Oklahoma families. Their own elected leaders gave them lip service, then took no action to advance their cause.
&n
bsp; It wasn’t my failure as an Asset that anybody had to worry about. It was the mediocrity of leadership on Capitol Hill. Their fraud. Their grandstanding to exaggerate their performance. Their self promotion that was empty like a Hollywood movie script once the TV cameras rolled back on the soundstage of FOX News.304
In all of this, Republicans carried the most guilt, by an order of magnitude. They created political theater from the War on Terror, playing stridently to the emotions of the people, and turning 9/11 into a spectacle for election campaigning. Unhappily, there was nothing substantial backing up the hoopla. Once you got past the front gates of Guantanamo and the opening title of the Patriot Act, Republican terrorism policy was awfully empty on performance.
It was all trash talk and campaign propaganda. A lot of noise. A lot of bells and whistles. But the actions that would have accomplished something real to shut down terrorism at the field level, much of that was never done.
After a decade of field work, I saw it as a con job to attract voters. I was bitterly astounded by the waste of it.
I’m still angry about that.
Therein lay the problem for Congress.
I was not going along with the program. As a long-time Asset, I wanted Americans to have the facts. I wanted to talk. And any truth telling at all would have made it impossible for Congress to sell its deceptions to the voting public.
That put me on a collision course with Capitol Hill.
Two actions finally tipped the balance against me. In February, 2004, to appease public unhappiness, President Bush was forced to appoint a blue ribbon commission to examine failures in Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence.
Within days, I approached the senior staff of Senators Trent Lott and John McCain, and formally requested to testify in front of the new Commission.305
FBI phone taps captured several conversations with Senator Lott’s staff, proving that I identified myself as a U.S Intelligence Asset. I told Senator Lott’s staff that I possessed by far the most extensive knowledge of Pre-War Intelligence as a primary source. I told staff I wanted the new Presidential Commission to hear my story for the public record.
One of those conversations with Senator’s Lott’s staff is documented in the first chapter of this book.
From a work phone, I also called the office of Senator McCain on my lunch hour. On my mother’s side, my great grandmother pioneered Arizona at the turn of the century. I assured McCain’s staff that I’ve got ties from Tucson to Tempe and Chandler, across to Scottsdale and Phoenix and Glendale, all the way up to Flagstaff and Payson and Pinetop in the White Mountain Apache Reservation. My grandfather taught me to fish on Lake Roosevelt.
I had my address book. I read through every zip code to prove that my father, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles are McCain constituents in Arizona to this day. Above all, I insisted that my own flesh and blood had a right to hear details about my activities as an Asset before the War.
Just to make sure I got my point across, I took a second critical action. I sent a fax to every Congressional office in the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans alike. I admit this was like waving a red flag in front of an unhappy bull. But frankly, they deserved it.
My friends at the FBI captured my flash bulletin, gratis of the Patriot Act:306
“There’s a lot of bad information circulating in government circles about Iraq’s pre-war activities. For the sake of historical clarity, I am releasing the following letters that were signed and delivered to Andy Card, Secretary of State Colin Powell and the U.N. Security Council. The letters detail Iraq’s efforts to resume weapons inspections, beginning the month before President Bush’s inauguration and Iraq’s attempts to cooperate with the International War on Terrorism after September 11.”
“Contrary to reports coming out of the White House, they knew very well that Iraq tried for two years to prove it had no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Iraq always behaved like a nation anxious to prove its compliance.”
“The White House also knew that Iraq had invited the FBI to interview human assets in Baghdad for the War on Terrorism, including Mr. Al-Anai and others holding information about Al Qaeda, as well as the Oklahoma City Bombing. Baghdad was convinced this information would be prized by the Intelligence Community. Yet the U.S. refused to conduct those interviews.”
“Unhappily, the Leadership of the United States was more excited by the grandiose disinformation circulated by the Iraqi Exiles than by warnings of the Intelligence Community or Anti-War Protests by American voters.”
“Many of us are gravely concerned that those Iraqi Exiles have so easily manipulated America’s Leadership.”
“But this is NOT, repeat NOT the failure of U.S. Intelligence. It is most definitely the failure of a Leadership that refused to consider any information that did not fit into its agenda—an agenda created wholly to benefit an Exile Community famous for its lies and deceptions. Most tragically, this policy is igniting more attacks on the U.S. and thus damaging U.S. security.”
Now Congress had a serious problem.
The blue ribbon commission on Iraq was supposed to spotlight the failure of the intelligence community. If my information got in front of the public, Americans would discover that some parts of the intelligence community had done a pretty damn good job. We aggressively sought to warn Congress off this War.307 Not only that, a substantial peace option had been available throughout the public debate, which would have achieved every U.S objective in the conflict without firing a shot, or costing one young American his arm or leg.308
Any way you cut the cards, though only a small handful of us qualified as active Assets engaged with Iraq, my team’s actions would have deflected from mistakes by any other source—if politicians on Capitol Hill had been willing to consider peaceful diplomacy as an alternative to military conflict. We’d laid a path out of their troubles.
That truth especially scared the hell out of leaders on Capitol Hill. The existence of a credible peace option couldn’t be allowed into the public debate. Not with the Presidential and Congressional election sweepstakes running neck and neck, amidst skyrocketing anti-incumbent sentiments. I would have to be stopped.
Both Democrats and Republicans alike hoped to double-talk their way out of trouble with voters.
But only one party was dirty enough to point the cross-hairs of its attack guns at Assets involved in anti-terrorism and Pre-War Intelligence.
When I phoned the offices of Senator John McCain and Senator Trent Lott, Republican leaders pinned their sights on me. My own cousin, Andy Card, Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush gave Republicans the green light to do their worst.
No question about it. This decision came from the very top.
CHAPTER 17:
THE PATRIOT ACT
In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
–George Orwell
In the parlance of the intelligence community, it’s known as “termination with extreme prejudice.”
“Extreme prejudice” involves the assassination of an intelligence operative, or such physical destruction to body and soul that speech would be rendered impossible or meaningless. It goes far beyond the destruction of an Asset’s credibility or reputation. That’s secondary, a side dish for sadists. The central purpose of “extreme prejudice” is annihilation, purposefully killing an Asset’s physical and spiritual being.
It’s the most severe degree of punishment that gets meted out to those whose actions would irrevocably damage the intelligence community, or otherwise threaten to expose its dirty laundry. Ah, and what’s classified “top secret” if not something the government urgently does not want people to know? Like our advance warning about 9/11. Or Iraq’s cooperation with anti-terrorism. Or the Iraq peace option. And so, finally, “extreme prejudice” gets invoked as a policy of last resort, when Assets pose a significant threat to crooked politicians desperate to escape exposure and blowback for their own schemes gone awry.
When truth becomes treason, when something’s so dirty that somebody powerful will stop at nothing to hide it, that’s when “extreme prejudice” comes into play.
It explains why there’s a sort of urban legend in the intelligence community— that an Asset has no future. Only a gunshot to the head when what you know becomes too inconvenient.
Foreign assets captured by the other side typically get tortured before dying, so as to squeeze out every bit of intelligence they’ve handed over to the Americans. Or so I’ve been told. The bullet at the end becomes almost a symbolic act of mercy. For old times sake. In remembrance of whatever comradeship existed before the betrayal.
Until that moment, the Asset faces maximum pain for payback.
Surely they couldn’t do that to me? I “had people” watching my back all those years. They could vouch for my past— even if my anti-war activities infuriated them in the present. (Otherwise they would be guilty of perjury.) I’d done exactly what I told Hoven and Dr. Fuisz from the very start of our adventure. I opposed any second War with Iraq. I never imagined that my faith in my handlers was naïve— though I’d been warned you can’t trust your friends in the intelligence community any more than you can trust your friends’ enemies.
My CIA handler, Dr. Fuisz, used to say it’s nothing personal. Assets are simply expendable. One side will trade you to the other in a heartbeat.
I just never imagined it would be my heartbeat.
And what code of honor had I violated?
I wanted to proudly represent the voice of dissension on War policy, which got a lot of things right, thank you! In Congressional testimony, I would explain that I’d done exactly what Assets should, building a message platform to sound the alarms about mistakes in assumptions on Capitol Hill. We practiced healthy and vigorous debate in the best tradition of our democracy, which embraces a wrangling over ideas. Oh yes, and I would testify that back-channel diplomacy produced substantial opportunities for conflict resolution. The foresight of this faction had guaranteed Washington controlled the agenda in Baghdad, and maximized advantages for the U.S. in any post-sanctions period. Only pro-war Republicans in Congress and the White House had opted for different policy scenarios.
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 31