The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [204]
A second allegation, persistently propagated before and after 9/11 by Laurie Mylroie, a scholar associated with the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, proposed that Ramzi Yousef—the terrorist responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—had been an Iraqi agent using a stolen identity. Investigation by others, including the FBI, indicated that the speculation is unsupported by hard evidence.
Mylroie, meanwhile, appeared to believe that Saddam Hussein had been behind multiple terrorist attacks over a ten-year period, from the East Africa embassy bombings to Oklahoma City and 9/11. “My view,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, “is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq.” Mylroie’s claim about Yousef nevertheless proved durable.
None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved out. “We went back ten years,” said former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, who looked into the matter at the request of Director Tenet. “We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [al Qaeda] and Saddam.”
A CIA report entitled “Iraqi Support for Terrorism,” completed in January 2003, was the last in-depth analysis the Agency produced prior to the invasion of Iraq in March. “The Intelligence Community,” it concluded, “has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al Qaeda strike.”
After exhaustive trawls of the record, official probes have concluded that senior Bush administration officials applied inordinate pressure to try to establish that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, and that American torture of al Qaeda prisoners was a result of such pressure. CIA analysts noted that “questions regarding al Qaeda’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior operational planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed following his capture.” KSM was one of those most persistently subjected to torture.
The CIA’s Charles Duelfer, who was in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials after the invasion, recalled being “asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used” on a detainee who had handled contacts with terrorist groups and might have knowledge of links between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda.
The notion was turned down. Duelfer noted, however, that it had come from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA)” who thought the detainee’s interrogation had been “too gentle.” Two U.S. intelligence officers, meanwhile, have said flatly that the suggestion came from Vice President Cheney’s office.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent and why extreme methods were used,” a former senior intelligence official said in 2009. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaeda and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Paul Burney, told military investigators that interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. “We were not successful,” Burney said in interviews for the Army’s inspector general, but “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
In the absence of evidence, according to the author and Pulitzer winner Ron Suskind, it was in one instance fabricated. Suskind has reported that in fall 2003—when the U.S. administration was still struggling to justify the invasion of Iraq—the White House asked the CIA to collaborate in the forgery of a document stating that hijacker leader Atta had spent time training in Iraq.
The forgery took the form of a purported memo to Saddam Hussein from the former head of the Iraqi intelligence service. The memo was