Juan Cole: Was Abu Nidal Forgery Aimed at Refuting Joe Wilson?

[seafan]

Was Abu Nidal Forgery Aimed at Refuting Joe Wilson?

By Juan Cole
August 6, 2008

The LA Times summarizes the case made by journalist Ron Suskind that the Bush administration orchestrated the forging of a document by Iraqi defector and former intelligence chief Tahir Jalil Habbush. Habbush was allegedly paid $5 million and settled in Jordan because of his cooperation.

The document, which alleged that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta received training at a camp run by Abu Nidal in Baghdad, was leaked to British hack Con Coughlin in December, 2003.

The allegations in the document are completely implausible. Sabri Khalil al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal, was a psychopathic and paranoid leftist who had had ties to East Germany and split with the PLO because it was too far right for him. Neither al-Qaeda, a far rightwing Muslim fundamentalist cult, would have been willing to have anything to do with him, nor he with it.

.....

Ironically, Habbush, who created the forgery, had probably been the one who whacked Abu Nidal, as head of Iraqi intelligence, in 2002. So, having killed the man, Habbush then used him for tradecraft purposes.

The letter also mentions, according to Coughlin, the purchase of uranium from Niger by Iraq and its transshipment across Libya and Syria.
Ayad Allawi, a long-time CIA asset, vouched for the forged document to Coughlin. That item is circumstantial evidence for Suskind's narrative about Bush coercing the Company into manufacturing this thing. Allawi, based in London, had a special charge from the CIA to cultivate ex-officers who defected from Iraq, so he may have been Habbush's handler.

Now for the big mystery: Why bother to cook up this document in September, 2003, after the US had already conquered Iraq?

It seems to me likely that the forgery was ordered by the White House as a direct response to Ambassador Joe Wilson's New York Times op-ed that revealed that he had falsified the allegation that Saddam had recently bought yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger.
By September of 2003, a guerrilla war was raging in Iraq and it had become clear that there was no WMD. Shiite cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim was blown up in Najaf on August 31. GIs were being killed in al-Anbar.

Bush and Cheney needed to refute Wilson's allegation that they ignored his report on Niger uranium. They also needed a smoking gun to tie Iraq to al-Qaeda, without which their continued occupation of the country was on thin legal grounds.

Tying Atta to Abu Nidal would form an ex post facto justification for the war, something Bush desperately needed.
Tying Syria and Libya to the alleged Iraqi nuclear program was also a way to set them up as the next targets.

This sounds very plausible as to the actions and mindset of Bush/Cheney to refute Joe Wilson's claims at the time, as this document was cooked up and leaked to UK journalist Con Coughlin in late 2003.


Juan Cole is on to something here.




(See Cole's link for multiple internal text hyperlinks.)

[harun]

1. K & R (n/t)

[gratuitous]

2. It's pretty clear that the Bush administration will say and do anything

So, while I can't say whether Cole's column is true or not, considering the track record of lies, evasions and obfuscations of the Bush administration, Cole's thesis is certainly plausible. And yet, like Reagan with Alzheimers, our bulldogs in the press can't quite seem to recall that they've been lied to on this and other matters. So, when the non-denial denials are issued by the Bush administration, they just get recited in the media without any context at all.

[sourmilk]

3. Subpoena Michael Ledeen and find out.

:sarcasm: