The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [205]
The story of this fakery raised a brief media storm and a spate of denials. Rebuttals included a carefully phrased statement from Suskind’s primary source, a former head of the CIA’s Near East Division named Rob Richer—to which Suskind responded by publishing a transcript of one of his interviews with Richer.
Another former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, meanwhile, placed responsibility for the fabrication on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, at the instigation of Vice President Cheney. According to Giraldi, the Pentagon, unlike the CIA, had “no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public” and had “its own false documents center.”
If it happened, the forgery was the most flagrant attempt, in a long line of such maneuvering, to blame 9/11 on Iraq—and it has never been officially investigated.
A former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, Paul Pillar, has called the case against Iraq “a manufactured issue.”
In 2008, by a bipartisan majority of ten to five, the Senate Intelligence Committee produced its “Report on Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information.” “Unfortunately,” said its chairman, John D. Rockefeller,
our Committee has concluded that the administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence. In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.
It’s my belief that the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.
IN THE SEVEN YEARS since the invasion of Iraq, reputable estimates indicate, more than 4,000 American soldiers have died and 32,000 have suffered serious injury as a result of the invasion and the violence that followed. Some 9,000 Iraqi men in uniform were killed, and 55,000 insurgents. Figures suggest that more than 100,000 civilians died during and following the invasion.
A total of some 168,000 people, then, have died—and tens of thousands have been injured—as the result of an attack on a nation that many Americans had been falsely led to believe bore some if not all of the responsibility for the attacks of September 11.
The 3,000 who died in New York, Washington, and the field in Pennsylvania, the many hundreds who have died since from exposure to the toxins they breathed in at Ground Zero, and all their grieving relatives, deserved better than to have had their tragedy manipulated in such a way.
THIRTY-FIVE
IN THE YEARS THAT THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ HAD THE WORLD’S ATTENTION, the real evidence that linked other nations to Osama bin Laden and 9/11 faded from the public consciousness. This was in part the fault of the 9/11 Commission, which blurred the facts rather than highlighting them. It was, ironically, a former deputy homeland security adviser to President Bush, Richard Falkenrath, who loudly expressed that uncomfortable truth.
The Commission’s Report, Falkenrath wrote, had produced only superficial coverage of the fact that al Qaeda was “led and financed largely by Saudis, with extensive support from Pakistani intelligence.” Saudi Arabia’s murky role has been covered in these pages. The part played by Pakistan—not least given the stunning news that was to break upon the world in spring 2011—deserves equally close scrutiny.
Pakistan has a strong Islamic fundamentalist movement