The 9/11 Wars (106 page)

    
7
.
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI
on Iraq’s WMD, Chemical Section
, p. 123.

    
8
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 262.

    
9
.
Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, pp. 412–16.

  
10
.
Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells, ‘Iraqi global misinformation campaign was used to build case for war’, Knight Ridder, March 16, 2004.

  
11
.
Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, ‘How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam’,
Guardian
, February 15, 2010.

  
12
.
The full interrogation documents of Saddam Hussein by the FBI in March 2004 are available at
www.nsarchive.org
. See also Glenn Kessler, ‘Hussein pointed to Iranian threat’,
Washington Post
, July 2, 2009.

  
13
.
Rose, ‘Tortured reasoning’.

  
14
.
National Intelligence Estimate,
Iraq’s Continuing Programs of WMD
, October 1, 2002, pp. 66–8. Jason Burke, ‘The missing link’,
Guardian
, February 9, 2003. Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The great terror’,
New Yorker
, March 25, 2002.

  
15
.
Also Jonathan S. Landay, ‘Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link’,
McClatchy Newspapers
, April 21, 2009. The Bush administration systematically leaked information from Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations. One analyst who worked at the Pentagon told reporter David Rose of
Vanity Fair
: ‘I first saw the reports soon after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. There was a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of al-Qaeda’s supposed relationship with the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.’

  
16
.
The author learned of this meeting at the time from Saudi and Pakistani security sources but was unable to confirm sufficiently for publication.

  
17
.
United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq Where Substantiated by US Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information
, p. 63.

  
18
.
John Solomon, ‘First declassified Iraq documents released’, Associated Press Online, March 16, 2006. Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi foreign minister, later told interrogators that Saddam ‘had only ever expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden’. Robert Burns, ‘Iraqi: Saddam “delighted” in terror attacks on US’, Associated Press, September 22, 2010.

  
19
.
Technically outside the no-fly zone and thus the haven, Mosul and its tradition of Islamism had been and was an important factor.

  
20
.
For more see Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 225–7, which draws on interviews with militants in Kurdish custody and with Kurdish intelligence officers in August 2002 in Suleimaniyah, Iraq, as well as Western intelligence documents, principally the interrogation report of German members of the al-Tawhid group.

  
21
.
Bergen,
The Longest War
, pp. 144–5.

  
22
.
Subsequently, the bipartisan commission of inquiry set up in November 2002 by Congress and, reluctantly, the president to report on the causes of the 9/11 attacks concluded that there was no evidence of a ‘collaborative … operational relationship’, and a study by the Institute for Defense Analyses, written for the US Joint Forces Command and based on 600,000 documents captured in Iraq after the invasion, found that nothing indicated ‘direct coordination and assistance between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda’.
The 9/11 Commission Report
, p. 66. Institute for Defense Analyses, ‘Iraqi Perspective Project: Saddam and Terrorism’, March 20, 2008, at
http://www.fas.orga/irp/eprint/iraqi/index.html
. See also Congressional Research Service (Kenneth Katzmann),
Report for Congress: Al’Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links
, updated August 15, 2008. In his memoirs, the CIA director at the time, George Tenet, also indicated that the CIA view was that any contacts were simply exploratory rather than collaborative – though he played a close role in the preparation of Powell’s United Nations presentation. See Tenet,
At the Center of the Storm
, pp. 341–58. ‘Report. No proof of Qaeda–Saddam link’, CBS News, September 8, 2006.

  
23
.
See the useful discussion in Kampfner,
Blair’s Wars
, pp. 264–7. For the flaws in the dossier see Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 16–17.

  
24
.
Briefings citing ‘intelligence’ given to ‘lobby’ or political correspondents rather than specialist security reporters had been a favoured method of consolidating support for the invasion of Afghanistan. One of the more egregious examples of this kind of material was the revelation that bin Laden was set to unleash a ‘£20bn flood of heroin’ on the West: Kamal Ahmed, ‘The terrorism crisis: No 10 fears £20bn flood of heroin, troops aim to destroy huge stockpile of opium about to be released on to the world market’,
Observer
, September 30, 2001.

  
25
.
The 9/11 Commission Report
, p. 170.

  
26
.
Human Rights Watch briefing,
Opportunism in the Face of Tragedy
, New York, 2002. Katherine Arms, ‘China links separatists to training by al-Qaeda’, UPI, June 26, 2002.

  
27
.
Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, p. 15.
Herald
, Karachi, May, 2002. Nicholas Wood, ‘Macedonian officials suspected of faking terror plot’,
New York Times
, May 15, 2004. ‘Macedonia faked “militant” raid’, BBC News Online, April, 30, 2004. Four security service officers were charged with murder. ‘It was a monstrous fabrication to get the attention of the international community,’ Interior Ministry spokeswoman Mirjana Kontevska told a news conference.

  
28
.
Tariq Panja and Martin Bright, ‘Man Utd bomb plot probe ends in farce’,
Observer
, May 2, 2004.

  
29
.
Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 14–19, 285. For an example of the media reporting see ‘Ricin suspects linked to al-Qaeda’, CNN, January 17, 2003.

  
30
.
A leak to the
Sun
did the rest. No charges were ever brought. See the excellent investigation by Peter Oborne, ‘The Use and Abuse of Terror’, in
Playing Politics with Terrorism
, ed. George Kassimeris, Hurst, 2007, pp. 124–5.

  
31
.
Hala Jaber, ‘Ryanair gunman: I was not going to crash plane’,
Sunday Times
, October 13, 2002.

  
32
.
José Padilla was eventually convicted of terrorism charges, but the allegation of planning a dirty bomb – leaked to the press and covered extensively – was dropped. For more on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah see Rose, ‘Tortured reasoning’.

  
33
.
Chris McGreal, ‘The Nevada gambler, al-Qaida, the CIA and the mother of all cons’,
Guardian
, December 23, 2009.

  
34
.
John Mueller, ‘Is There Still a Terrorist Threat? The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy’,
Foreign Affairs
, September–October 2006. Testimony of Robert S. Mueller III, Director, FBI, before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, February 11, 2003.

  
35
.
‘The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.’
Vanity Fair
Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, May 9, 2003, transcript on
http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2594
.

  
36
.
One influence on Bush and other senior administration figures was Bernard Lewis, the American historian of the Islamic world, who forcefully argued that a lack of Western-style freedoms was the fundamental cause of the Middle East’s economic, social and political weaknesses. He made these views to a mass audience in the best-selling
‘What Went Wrong’: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
, Oxford University Press, 2002. See also the article of the same title,
Atlantic Monthly
, January 2002. In his memoir, Bush talks of how ‘the Middle East was the centre of a global ideological struggle. On the one side were decent people who wanted to live in dignity and peace. On the other were extremists who sought to impose their radical views through violence and intimidation. They exploited conditions of hopelessness and repression to recruit and spread their ideology. The best way to protect our countries in the long run was to counter their dark vision with a more compelling alternative. That alternative was freedom. Once liberty took root in one society it could spread to others.’
Decision Points
, p. 232.

  
37
.
Thomas Powers, ‘War and its consequences’,
New York Review of Books
, March 27, 2003.

  
38
.
Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, p. 422.

  
39
.
James Fallows, ‘Blind into Baghdad’,
Atlantic Monthly
, January/February 2004. Feith also explained that Donald Rumsfeld’s vision was about ‘the need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence.’

  
40
.
Robert K. Brigham,
Iraq, Vietnam and the Limits of American Power
, p. 2.

  
41
.
See Bush,
Decision Points
, pp. 248–9. This preoccupation with humanitarian issues, it is worth pointing out, was also shared by many anti-war campaigners and international institutions such as the UN.

  
42
.
Ricks,
Fiasco
, p. 146. Ricks quotes from an internal American Army War College summary. The war plan designed by General Tommy Franks, stated baldly that ‘regime change’ was the ‘endstate of this mission’.

  
43
.
Sixteen months of effort by a full military staff went into planning the war, eight weeks of work by a scratch team into planning for the post-war situation. A Congressional Research Service Report of April 2003 entitled
Iraq: Recent Developments in Humanitarian and Reconstruction Assistance
optimistically states: ‘After an initial period of U.S.-led aid activities, existing Iraqi ministries, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international organizations are expected to assume some of the burden.’

  
44
.
Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, p. 429.