Mark Hickey wrote:
> The
> administration has never linked 9/11 and Iraq, and never used that as
> an "excuse for war", contrary to your contention.
From
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0716-10.htm
Published on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 by the lnter Press Service
Key Officials Used 9/11 As Pretext for Iraq War
by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With demands for a full-scale investigation of the
manipulation of intelligence by the administration of Pres. George W.
Bush mounting steadily, it appears increasingly clear that key officials
and their allies outside the administration intended to use the Sep. 11,
2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within
hours of the attacks themselves.
Within the administration, the principals appear to have included
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
Vice Pres. **** Cheney, and his national security adviser, I. Lewis
Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and
the State Department.
Outside the administration, key figures included close friends of both
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle, former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey -- both members of
Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank Gaffney, head of the
arms-industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and William Kristol,
editor of Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among others.
PNAC, which is based on the fifth floor of American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) building, in downtown Washington, was founded in 1997 with the
signing of a statement of principles calling for ”a Reaganite policy of
military strength and moral clarity”, signed by 25 prominent
neo-conservatives and right-wingers, including, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Cheney and Libby, as well as several other senior Bush administration
officials.
A close examination of the public record indicates that all of these
individuals -- both in and outside the administration -- were actively
preparing the ground within days, even hours, after the 9/11 attacks,
for an eventual attack on Iraq, whether or not it had any role in the
attacks or any connection to al Qaeda.
The challenge, in their view, was to persuade the public that such links
either did indeed exist or were sufficiently likely to exist that a
preventive strike against Iraq was warranted. Their success in that
respect was stunning, although, in order to pull it off, they also had
to distort and exaggerate the evidence being collected by U.S.
intelligence agencies.
A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attacks
and al Qaeda surfaced last month in a June televised interview of Gen.
Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs program, 'Meet the Press.' In
answer to a question, Clark asserted, ”There was a concerted effort
during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11
and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein”.
”It came from the White House, it came from other people around the
White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN,
and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected.
This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam
Hussein'.”
While Clark has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey,
Gaffney, and Kristol were using the same language in their media
appearances on 9/11 and over the following weeks.
”This could not have been done without help of one or more governments,”
Perle told The Washington Post on Sep. 11. ”Someone taught these suicide
bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done
without the assistance of large governments.”
Woolsey was more direct. ”(I)t's not impossible that terrorist groups
could work together with the government...the Iraqi government has been
quite closely involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and -- on
some matters -- has had direct contact with (Osama) bin Laden,” he told
one anchorman in a series of at least half a dozen national television
appearances on Sep. 11 and 12.
That same evening, Kristol echoed Woolsey on National Public Radio. ”I
think Iraq is, actually, the big, unspoken sort of elephant in the room
today. There's a fair amount of evidence that Iraq has had very close
associations with Osama bin Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it
had associations with the previous effort to destroy the World Trade
Center (in 1993)”.
While Kristol and Co. were trying to implicate Hussein in the public
debate, their friends in the administration were pushing hard in the
same direction. Cheney, according to published accounts, had already
confided to friends even before Sep. 11 that he hoped the Bush
administration would remove Hussein from power.
But the evidence about Rumsfeld is even more dramatic. According to an
account by veteran CBS newsman David Martin last September, Rumsfeld was
”telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though
there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks” five hours
after an American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon.
Martin attributed his account in part to notes that had been taken at
the time by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the defense chief asking for the
”best info fast” to ”judge whether good enough to hit SH (Saddam
Hussein) at the same time, not only UBL (Usama bin Laden). The
administration should ”go massive...sweep it all up, things related and
not”, the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying.
Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an account of the meeting
Sep. 15-16 of the administration's war council at Camp David provided by
the Washington Post's Bill Woodward and Dan Balz. In the ”I-was-there”
style for which Woodward, whose access to powerful officials since his
investigative role in the Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is
unmatched, is famous:
”Wolfowitz argued (at the meeting) that the real source of all the
trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of
Sept 11 created an opportunity to strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked again: 'Is
this the time to attack Iraq'”?
”Powell objected”, the Woodward and Balz account continued, citing
Secretary of State Colin Powell's argument that U.S. allies would not
support a strike on Iraq. ”If you get something pinning Sept 11 on Iraq,
great”, Powell is quoted as saying. But let's get Afghanistan now. If we
do that, we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq -- if we
can prove Iraq had a role”.
Upon their return to Washington, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz convened a
secret, two-day meeting of the DPB chaired by Perle. Instead of focusing
on the first steps in carrying out a ”war on terrorism”, however, the
discussions centered on how Washington could use 9/11 to strike at Iraq,
according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Ahmed
Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC),
neither the State Department nor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
was invited to participate in the meeting.
After those deliberations concluded, however, Woolsey was sent -- it
remains unclear under whose authority -- to London to collect evidence
of any possible ties between Baghdad and al Qaeda.
Although he returned empty-handed, that did not prevent him and his
close associates on the DPB from writing and speaking out in the press
about Hussein's alleged -- and completely unconfirmed -- role in the
1993 World Trade Center bombing and any other rumor, dubiously-sourced
story, or allegations by INC-supplied defectors that appeared to
implicate Hussein in terrorist activities in general and with al Qaeda
in particular.
But even as the DPB was locked in the Pentagon, Kristol was gathering
signatures on a letter to Bush, eventually published in PNAC's name in
The Washington Times Sep. 20, advising him on targets in his war on
terrorism, an agenda that so far has anticipated to a remarkable degree
the evolution of Bush's actual policy. In addition to calling for the
ouster of the Taliban and war on al Qaeda -- as well as cutting off the
Palestinian Authority (PA) under Yassir Arafat and other moves -- the
letter stated explicitly that Saddam Hussein must go regardless of his
relationship to the attacks or al Qaeda.
”It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to
the recent attack on the United States,” it said. ”But even if evidence
does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the
eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an
effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the
war on international terrorism.”
The letter was signed by 38 prominent neo-conservatives, many of whom --
especially Perle, Kristol, Gaffney, William Bennett, DPB member Eliot
Cohen, AEI's Reuel Marc Gerecht and Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan,
syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, Clifford May and Randy
Scheunemann (who would go on to head the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq) -- would emerge, along with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous
champions of war with Iraq outside the administration.
It was the same people who, on behalf of their friends in the Pentagon,
also mounted an almost constant campaign against the CIA, the State
Department, and anyone else who tried to slow the drive to war or
question the administration's assertions about Hussein's links with al
Qaeda or the threat he posed to U.S. security.
Their success is beyond question. By last October, just before the House
of Representatives was to vote on giving Bush authority to go to war, a
survey by the Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of adult
respondents believed that ”Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the
Sep. 11 attacks”.
While that percentage has declined over time, a strong majority was
found late last month to believe that Hussein supported al Qaeda, and a
remarkable 52 percent believe that the U.S. has actually found ”clear
evidence in Iraq” of close ties between the two. A mere seven percent in
the latter poll said they believed ”there was no connection at all”, the
finding which most accurately reflects the views of the U.S.
intelligence community."
--
Frank Krygowski [To reply, remove rodent and vegetable dot com.
Substitute cc dot ysu dot
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