Witte Huis zwendel ivm Iraq?

[Hein van Meeteren]

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Book Says White House Ordered Iraq-WMD Forgery
http://www.truthout.org/article/book-says-white-house-ordered-iraq-wmd-forgery
Mike Allen reports for Politico.com: "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.'"

Among the 415-page book's other highlights:

  # John Maguire, one of two men who oversaw the CIA's Iraq Operations
    Group, was frustrated by what Suskind describes as the "tendency of
    the White House to ignore advice it didn't want to hear - advice
    that contradicted its willed certainty, political judgments, or
    rigid message strategies."

    And Suskind writes that the administration "did not want to hear the
    word insurgency."

  # In the first days of his presidency, Bush rejected advice from the
    CIA to wiretap Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2001 in
    Vienna, where he was staying in a hotel where the CIA had a
    listening device planted in the wall of the presidential suite, in
    need only of a battery change. The CIA said that if the surveillance
    were discovered, Putin's respect for Bush would be heightened.

    But Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, advised that
    it was "too risky, it might be discovered," Suskind writes. Bush
    decided against if as "a gut decision" based on what he thought was
    a friendship based on several conversations, including during the
    presidential campaign. The CIA had warned him that Putin "was a
    trained KGB agent ... [who] wants you to think he's your friend."

  # Suskind reports that Bush initially told Cheney he had to "'step
    back' in large meetings when they were together, like those at the
    NSC [National Security Council], because people were addressing and
    deferring to Cheney. Cheney said he understood, that he'd mostly
    just take notes at the big tables and then he and Bush would meet
    privately, frequently, to discuss options and action."

  # Suskind contends Cheney established "deniability" for Bush as part
    of the vice president's "complex strategies, developed over decades,
    for how to protect a president."

    "After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House,
    Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the
    break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in
    essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president
    shouldn't know - things that could be illegal, disruptive to key
    foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

    "They key was a signaling system, where the president made his
    wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could
    take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader
    cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he'd
    authorized. The whole point of Cheney's model is to make a president
    less accountable for his action. Cheney's view is that
    accountability - a bedrock feature of representative democracy - is
    not, in every case, a virtue."

  # Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost
    his "nerve" on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero
    bullhorn. Suskind says Bush's 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the
    fifth anniversary was "well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch
    of self-defensiveness."

    "Moving on its own natural arc, the country is in the process of
    leaving Bush - his bullying impulse fused, permanently, with
    satisfying vengeance - in the scattering ashes of 9/11," Suskind
    writes. "The high purpose his angry words carried after the attacks,
    and in two elections since, is dissolving with each passing minute."

  # Suskind writes in the acknowledgments that his research assistant,
    Greg Jackson, "was sent to New York on a project for the book" in
    September 2007 and was "detained by federal agents in Manhattan. He
    was interrogated and his notes were confiscated, violations of his
    First and Fourth Amendment rights." The author provides no further
    detail.

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