By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Monday, August 04, 2008 | | Published in : Nation/World |
An explosive new book by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist alleges President George W. Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to create a forged document showing a link between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda to create a "false pretense" for war.
“The White House had concocted a fake letter from [the director of the Iraqi intelligence service] to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” reporter Ron Suskind writes in his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”
Furthermore, Suskind alleges that the Bush administration knew Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction nor was the country an imminent threat, which is what the March 2003 invasion was predicated on. The director of the Iraqi intelligence service informed the White House “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.” “They secretly resettled [the intelligence official] in Jordan, paid him $5 million – which one could argue was hush money – and then used his captive status to help deceive the world about one of the era’s most crushing truths: that America had gone to war under false pretenses,” Suskind writes says. Suskind, who won Pulitzer Prize during his tenure as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, writes in his new book that the plan to use the CIA to create a bogus link between Iraq and al-Qaeda appears to be in direct violation of a statute that prohibits the CIA from conducting cover operations “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media.”
“It is not the sort of offense, such as assault or burglary, that carries specific penalties, for example, a fine or jail time,” Suskind writes. “It is much broader than that. It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”
The allegations would appear to back up claims made by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who says Congress has plenty of evidence that Bush deserves impeachment for misleading the nation into war in Iraq, authorizing torture and other grave crimes, and violating the Constitution – and it is now time to act.
Aides to Kucinich said Monday the congressman is contemplating how to best proceed with his plan to have Congress hold impeachment proceedings following a House committee hearing two weeks ago on Bush’s “imperial presidency.” At the hearing, Kucinich ticked off numerous high crimes and misdemeanors Bush committed during his two-terms in office.
In June, Kucinich stunned colleagues when he introduced an impeachment resolution on the House floor and then spent nearly five hours reading the 35 articles, alleging that President Bush was guilty of a wide range of crimes.
The articles of impeachment were introduced a few days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a long-awaited report on prewar Iraq intelligence that concluded Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney knowingly misled the public and Congress about Iraq's links to al-Qaeda and the threat the country posed to the United States.
The House sidetracked Kucinich’s resolution by voting – 251-166 – to send it to the House Judiciary Committee. At the time, Kucinich said he expected Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to hold hearings within a 30-day deadline Kucinich had imposed, but Conyers chose not to act.
Kucinich said he had whittled down the 35 articles of impeachment to a single article, alleging Bush “deceived” Congress into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to get lawmakers to back a U.S.-led invasion of the country.
“We need to send a message to the next President that if he conducts himself in a similar capacity it would be met with a response from the Congress that you are going to be held to account. … There is a point at which you reduce Congress to a debating society,” Kucinich said in an interview in June.
Rebuffing Kucinich’s calls for impeachment hearings, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony about Bush’s “imperial presidency” and several of his administration’s scandals.
Bush knows that Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers, have long ago rejected impeachment proceedings, the one instrument included in the Constitution for Congress to wield against a President who has abused his powers.
In his book, The One Percent Doctrine, Suskind claimed that Bush had become obsessed with a high-value al-Qaeda associate named Abu Zubaydah who was captured in 2002. But Abu Zubaydah was not the “high value detainee” the CIA had claimed. He was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind's wrote.
Abu Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind wrote. But Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.
“And, so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk, Bush said in the spring of 2002, after Zubaydah was captured.
Abu Zubaydah became one of the first prisoners in the wake of 9/11 to undergo some of the harshest interrogation methods at the hands of American intelligence officials.
Despite the fact that Bush was briefed by the CIA about Zubaydah’s low-level al-Qaeda status, the president did not want to “lose face” because he had stated his importance publicly, Suskind wrote.
“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”
Abu Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of US targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. The waterboarding was videotaped, but that record was destroyed in November 2005. John Durham, an assistant attorney general in Connecticut, was appointed special counsel earlier this year to investigate the destruction of that videotape as well as destroyed film on other interrogations. Yet, Suskind wrote, the information Abu Zubaydah had provided under duress was not credible.
Still, that did not stop “thousands of uniformed men and women [who] raced in a panic to each … target.” And so, Suskind wrote, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.” In Suskind’s 2004 book, The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda at the first National Security Council There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.
O’Neill said even at that early date, the message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, a critic of the Iraq invasion who was forced out of his job in December 2002. “From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill told Suskind, adding that going after Saddam Hussein was a priority 10 days after the Bush’s inauguration and eight months before Sept. 11. As treasury secretary, O’Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. “From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” Suskind said. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.” |