Two days after Powell’s speech to the United Nations, on February 7, 2003, the administration raised the national terrorism alert from yellow or “elevated” risk to the orange “high” risk category. Health-care officials were told to be on the lookout for symptoms of biochemical contamination. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge urged that “families in the days ahead take some time to prepare for emergency,” while officials said the attacks could come in the form of biological, chemical, or radiological weapons. The Bush administration issued detailed advice about how the public should prepare for a WMD attack, including stocking up with food and water, and recommended that families keep a supply of duct tape and plastic sheeting handy to seal windows in the event of a chemical or biological weapons attack. Those warnings generated a surge in sales of plastic sheeting and duct tape in the Washington, D.C., area and generated a number of panicky media stories. This scare about an imminent WMD terrorist attack on the United States was politically quite useful for the Bush administration, which was only six weeks away from ordering the invasion of Iraq under the flag of disarming the supposedly WMD-armed regime of the terrorist-supporting Saddam Hussein.
Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq had “provided training in poisons and gases to two al-Qaeda associates,” a point that Powell had also made in his UN presentation. Such claims were, of course, not checkable by the media or the American public, as they relied on highly classified intelligence, and, in any event, they could only be refuted or confirmed by invading Iraq.
What the American public did not know about Tenet’s and Powell’s crucial claim that Iraq was training al-Qaeda associates on poison gases was that it didn’t show a nexus between bin Laden, Saddam, and some of the world’s nastiest weapons but was in fact the tainted fruit of an “extraordinary rendition,” in which militants, as we have seen, were transported by American officials to countries that routinely used torture, where they would finally divulge whatever secrets they had supposedly been keeping from their American interrogators.
In December 2001, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan militant who had run the al-Qaeda–affiliated Khaldan training camp, was captured in Pakistan. The two FBI agents at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan who were assigned to interrogate Libi sought advice from Jack Cloonan, a veteran FBI investigator who was deeply immersed in al-Qaeda because of his extensive interrogations of three members of the group who were already in American custody. Cloonan told his two FBI colleagues, “I don’t care what anyone else says, I would like you to do the following, which is advise al-Libi of his rights.” Cloonan briefed the two agents that Libi was an important person because of his position as “amir,” or commander, of the Khaldan camp, and someone they should be looking to get as much cooperation from as possible, as they would from any other suspect in any other case.
Under no duress, Libi spoke to the agents about Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who had recently been arrested in Boston after trying to blow up an American Airlines flight over the Atlantic. Reid had trained in the Khaldan camp under Libi, as had the supposed twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, so naturally what the Libyan had to say about these two men was of great interest to investigators. Libi also said there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Several days into Libi’s interrogation, an Arabic-speaking CIA official named Albert burst into Libi’s cell and in front of one of the FBI interrogators yelled at the prisoner, “You know where you are going. And while you’re there I’m going to find your mother and fuck her.” The CIA then rendered Libi to Egypt.
To improve his chances of better treatment once in Egypt’s notorious prisons, Libi fed his interrogators a number of fairy tales, including the nonsensical idea that al-Qaeda had cooperated with Russian organized crime to smuggle “canisters containing nuclear materials into New York.” But most importantly he told them that bin Laden had sent two operatives to Iraq to learn about biological and chemical weapons.
Because Libi’s story encapsulated the key arguments for the Iraq War, his tale was picked up by President Bush in a keynote speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, in which Bush laid out his rationale for the coming conflict with Iraq, saying, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” But once he was back in American custody, on February 14, 2004, Libi recanted what he had falsely told his Egyptian jailors. Libi told his U.S. interrogators that he had “fabricated” his tale of the Saddam–al-Qaeda–poison connection to the Egyptians following “physical abuse and threats of torture.”
Several months before any of the false claims of that connection based on Libi’s coerced statements were first made by Bush officials, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that Libi was likely making everything up. On February 22, 2002, DIA noted that Libi “lacks specific details on Iraq’s involvement. … It is possible he does not know any further details: it is more likely that he is intentionally misleading the debriefers.” The CIA followed that report up with its own six months later, finding that “questions persist about [Libi’s] forthrightness and truthfulness … he seems to have fabricated information.” Two key American intelligence agencies had raised serious doubts about Libi’s reliability yet those concerns were either not briefed to senior Bush officials or were simply ignored, despite the fact that this was the only evidence offered to the American public that made the key argument for the war—that Saddam had WMDs and that his regime had instructed members of al-Qaeda about their use.
Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam and bin Laden were allied, senior Bush officials maintained an almost theological certainty that they were joined at the hip. Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert in September 2003 that “[Iraq] was the geographic base of the terrorists that have had us under assault for many years, most especially on 9/11.” Cheney never corrected this egregious misstatement of the facts. During the same interview, Russert asked Cheney if Saddam had any role in 9/11, to which Cheney replied, “We don’t know,” which was a curious thing to say, since the most wide-ranging criminal investigation in American history had long before determined that Saddam had had no role in the attacks.
On June 16, 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 inquiry staff report was released, and it concluded that there was no operational relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The report also established that the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s cell phone records showed that he was in Florida at the time of his supposed meeting with the Iraqi spy in Prague on April 9, 2001. Calls from Atta’s cell were made multiple times on April 6, 9, 10, and 11 using cell phone transmitting sites in Florida.
The day after the 9/11 staff report came out—the conclusions had been trumpeted in a front-page story in the New York Times—an unusually animated Cheney was interviewed by Gloria Borger of CNBC about the supposed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection and, in particular, the supposed meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent.
CHENEY: We have never been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down. We just don’t know.
BORGER: Well, this report says it didn’t happen.
CHENEY: No, this report says they haven’t found any evidence.
BORGER: That it happened.
CHENEY: Right.
BORGER: But you haven’t found the evidence that it happened either, have you?
CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don’t know.
BORGER: So does this put it to rest for you or not on Atta?
CHENEY: It doesn’t—it doesn’t add anything from my perspective. I mean, I still am a skeptic. I can’t refute the Czech claim; I can’t prove the Czech claim. I just don’t know. It’s the nature of the intelligence business lots of times.
The claim that Atta had met in Prague with the Iraqi intelligence agent had just been definitively refuted by the 9/11 Commission (an inquiry that the Bush administra
tion had fought to prevent from ever happening). And by the time that Cheney spoke on CNBC, the evidence that Atta could not have been in Prague to meet with the Iraqi agent was already well-known to the U.S. government. According to the 2003 FBI’s “Hijackers Timeline,” Atta had cashed a check for eight hundred dollars at a SunTrust bank in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on April 4, 2001, and a week later had rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. The three-hundred-page FBI timeline painstakingly retraced the hijackers’ steps in the United States and found no evidence that Atta was out of the country at the time of his supposed meeting in Prague with the Iraqi agent. By October 2003, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the very same Iraqi intelligence agent who was supposed to have met with Atta, was in American custody, and he denied ever meeting him.
When Bush was asked by reporters about the 9/11 Commission’s findings in June 2004 that there was no “collaborative relationship” between al-Qaeda and Saddam, he resorted to tautology: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda; because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Not according to Saddam Hussein, who had been captured six months earlier. Appointed to be his interrogator was George Piro, a Lebanese-American who, unusually for an FBI agent, spoke excellent Arabic. Piro, a thirty-six-year-old avid student of Middle Eastern history who had already served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, would spend the next seven months with the former Iraqi dictator, speaking with him every day for anywhere between five and seven hours. Using standard (noncoercive) interrogation techniques, Piro built up a strong rapport with Saddam, even giving him some of his mom’s home-baked cookies when the Iraqi celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday.
Several months into his interrogations, Piro elicited the real story behind Iraq’s supposed WMD. Saddam told him that they had all been destroyed in the mid-1990s by UN inspectors, or by the Iraqis themselves, but this was kept secret to protect the regime’s aura of power among both its internal and external enemies. During the course of one of their discussions on June 28, 2004, Piro probed Saddam about his putative connections to al-Qaeda. The former Iraqi dictator dismissed the idea, explaining that bin Laden was a zealot with whom his regime did not cooperate. Just as Bush was assuring the world that al-Qaeda and Saddam had a relationship, the FBI, and through it the entire U.S. intelligence community, was confirming for the umpteenth time that there was no such thing.
Why did the Bush administration cling so tenaciously to the fiction of the Saddam–al-Qaeda alliance, given the fact that the bipartisan 9/11 Commission had concluded by June 2004 that there was no operational relationship between them? Part of the answer could be found in the fact that six months earlier, David Kay, the head of Iraq Survey Group, had admitted publicly to the world what was already painfully obvious: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Three months earlier, Bush had already obliquely acknowledged this at the annual Radio & TV Correspondents black-tie dinner in Washington, where he joked about how no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. At one point Bush showed a photo of himself searching under the furniture in the Oval Office, saying “Nope. No weapons over there.”)
On January 28, 2004, Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying, “We were all wrong” about Saddam’s WMD. Needless to say this was something of a surprise to the American public, which, following all of the Bush administration’s rhetoric about smoking guns and mushroom clouds, had been expecting there would be truckloads of WMD uncovered by American inspectors. Instead there was nothing, and instead of being greeted with flowers, as promised in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, by now American soldiers were being greeted with IEDs, and hundreds of U.S. servicemen had already died.
In an interview around the time that Kay was telling the world there was no WMDs in Iraq, Vice President Cheney asserted, “We haven’t really had the time to pore through all those records in Baghdad. We’ll find ample evidence confirming the link; that is, the connection if you will between al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.” But no documents were ever unearthed in Iraq proving the Saddam–al-Qaeda axis despite the fact that, like other totalitarian regimes, Saddam’s government kept meticulous records. The U.S. military had by 2006 translated 34 million pages of documents from Saddam’s Iraq and found there was nothing to substantiate a “partnership” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. And two years later the Pentagon’s own internal think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), concluded after examining 600,000 Saddam-era documents and several thousand hours of his regime’s audio- and videotapes that there was no “smoking gun (in other words, evidence of a direct connection between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda).”
IDA did find a document from 1993 in which Iraqi intelligence agents wrote that they had agreed to renew relations with Egypt’s Jihad Group, then led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, and also to continue to support financially Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord long allied to al-Qaeda. By the time of the Iraq invasion a decade later, nothing had come of those relationships and they were long defunct. And the IDA found nothing that substantiated any of the prewar claims about al-Qaeda’s relations with Saddam.
After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military did, however, discover a memo from the office of Saddam Hussein to his Mukhabarat intelligence organization, dated August 17, 2002. The letter asked the director of the Mukhabarat to be on the lookout for al-Qaeda associates who might have entered the country and to give the matter “extreme importance” and search “hotels, residential apartments and rented houses.” Attached to the letter was a photo of a man named “Ahmed Fadel al-Khalaylah,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s real name. This letter showed that rather than having any kind of relationship with Zarqawi, Saddam’s regime was trying to find him before the war and had instructed its intelligence agency to conduct a thorough search of all the accommodations that he might have been conceivably staying in.
In June 2008, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded, as every other investigation had before, that there was no “cooperative relationship” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The committee also found that “most of the contacts cited between Iraq and al-Qa’ida before the war by the intelligence community and policy makers have been determined not to have occurred.” The only meeting that had actually taken place was eight years before the invasion of Iraq, between Farouq Hijazi, a senior Iraqi intelligence official, and bin Laden in Sudan in early 1995. Once he was in U.S. custody, Hijazi told his American interrogators that he had been admonished by Saddam before the meeting not to negotiate or promise anything to the al-Qaeda leader but “only to listen.” Bin Laden asked to open an office in Baghdad and for military training for his men. Those requests were turned down flat by Saddam.
The only matter that Saddam’s agents and bin Laden did agree upon was for Iraq to broadcast the speeches of Salman al-Awdah, a cleric revered by bin Laden because he was sharply critical of the Saudi royal family. It is not clear if those speeches were ever broadcast. The sum total of the much-vaunted Saddam–al-Qaeda “relationship” that had been relentlessly touted by the Bush administration turned out to be an eight-year-old agreement to broadcast the speeches of a fiery Saudi cleric, something that, in any event, may have never happened.
Obviously, the American public would hardly have supported a war to interrupt a supposedly growing relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda that boiled down to a decade-old discussion about some nonexistent radio broadcasts.
Chapter 10
The War of Error
There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.
—H. L. Mencken
In his State of the Union speech of January 29, 2002, President Bush laid out a new doctrine of preemptive war, which went well beyond the long-established principle that the United States would go to war to prevent an adversary launching an attack that imminently threatened the country. The new doctrine, by contrast, meant that Bush could launch
a war whenever the United States might be threatened by another country at any point in the future, a determination the president reserved to himself. “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons,” Bush declared.
Bush identified those dangerous regimes as an “axis of evil” that comprised Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, echoing the United States’ wars against the Axis states of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Quite how this axis functioned was never explained, since in reality, Iran and Iraq had fought a bitter war throughout much of the 1980s, while Iranian involvement in the conference held in Bonn a month before Bush’s speech had helped to install the new American-backed interim government in Afghanistan.
At the graduation ceremony for West Point cadets on June 1, 2002, Bush elaborated on his preemptive war doctrine, saying, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize we have waited too long.” By then Bush had already decided on war with Saddam. A few weeks later, when Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, was attending one of his regular meetings with Condoleezza Rice, he started to raise concerns about the possible war. Rice cut him off, saying, “Save your breath. The president has already made up his mind.”
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