White House, CIA Forged a Saddam-Al Qaeda Connection?

The Bush administration is denying this, but I’d believe Ron Suskind over that crew any day. Politico’s Mike Allen summarizes a shocker from Suskind’s new book:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

 

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

Of course, journalistic frauds like Steve Hayes and Jeff Goldberg didn’t need White House forgeries to pimp the untruthful connection, but it couldn’t have hurt.