or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
August 05, 2008
CIA Agent Allegedly Involved In Forged Iraq Letter Ran Previous Operation To Create Pretext For War
In Ron Suskind's interview on NPR today (and also in his new book), he names CIA operative John Maguire as one of the people allegedly involved in the Iraq letter forging. This is from Suskind's NPR appearance:
SUSKIND: In the fall [of 2003]...the White House, they decide that a letter should be fabricated, dated July 2001, a handwritten letter from [Iraqi intelligence chief] Habbush to Saddam Hussein. And the letter should say that in fact Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, trained in Iraq prior to 9/11, showing a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and the letter should say Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help of al-Qaeda...NPR: Are you saying the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate evidence, even after the invasion of Iraq, fabricate evidence linking Iraq to 9/11, in effect.
SUSKIND: Absolutely. George Tenet comes back from a White House briefing...folks at CIA remember seeing the creamy White House stationery. Tenet says, we want a letter fabricated, and we want this letter to essentially emerge, this handwritten letter from Habbush, to Saddam, which is essentially a checking of the box on all the controversies on WMD that are unfolding that the United States may have been taken to war under false pretenses...
NPR: Are you saying George Tenet told you, I was given this order to lie, and I fulfilled that?
SUSKIND: There are off the record sources in the book, but there are on the record sources who are right in the thick of this operation: Rob Richer, the head of the Near East Division, just a notch or two below Tenet. Richer turns to Tenet, as [Richer] remembers it, and says, "Listen, Marine"—Richer's a former Marine—"you're not going to like this, but here goes." Richer then takes it, he turns to John Maguire, who runs Iraq for the CIA, another senior manager. And Richer talks to Maguire, old intelligence hands, and they say, goodness gracious, all right, well, an order's an order. And it goes down the chain.
This is the description, in Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, of part of a pre-war covert CIA plan named Anabasis and run by John Maguire. It had been authorized by George Bush in February, 2002:
Who needed evidence of weapons of mass destruction? John Maguire, the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group, and the agency officers working the Anabasis project had their own plan for starting the war, and it had nothing to do with the WMD debate. They also had a small army of Iraqi commandoes—led by a former Iraqi war hero—willing to put the plan into action...The plan was a core element of the original Anabasis program. These were the CIA-backed commandoes who would seize control of an Iraqi case at Nukhaib, near the Saudi border. Then they would go on the radio, announce a coup was underway, call on military units within Iraq to join them, and request that other nations support their bid to topple Saddam. Saddam, the thinking went, would be compelled to send troops to regain the base. But that would require him to violate the no-fly zone. The United States and Britain would then have a reason to attack Saddam's forces, and the war would be on. The Bush administration, Maguire later said, "was too wedded" to the WMD argument for war. "The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out." If all went as planned, "you'd have a premise for war: we've been invited in."
However, the administration continued to rely on the WMD justification, and this plan was never put into effect.
Amusingly, Anabasis was almost a xerox of Saddam Hussein's scheme for his invasion of Kuwait; while no one on earth remembers this now, Iraq justified their attack in the same way. This is from the New York Times on August 3, 1990:
Iraq said it struck to support a coup by young Kuwaiti revolutionaries against the Sabah family, whom it denounced as ''traitors and agents of Zionist and foreign schemes.''
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at August 5, 2008 04:54 PMIt apears that the Bushies regularly entertain schemes to trick the American people into supporting war. Of course, we'll only ever hear about the plans they decided not to use (or plans they did use but have sufficient levels of plausable deniability - i.e. "bad intelligence" or whatnot).
But, if you to dare to wonder if the 9/11 attacks might have had a similar origin, then you're just batshit crazy...
Posted by: Daldude at August 5, 2008 07:00 PMThis adminstration is rotten through and through and has lied again and again and is capable of doing ANYTHING. What a sorry mess our country is in and worse still, for individuals and nations that have been targeted, it is the worst nightmare ever.
Frankensteinian Foreign Policy. (only no villagers out to stop the monster)
Posted by: Mike Meyer at August 5, 2008 08:44 PM"But, if you to dare to wonder if the 9/11 attacks might have had a similar origin, then you're just batshit crazy..."
Personally, my problem with The Truthers (apart from the batshit crazy stuff) is simply the overthinking. This is the Bush administration we're talking about here. If you want me to go down this path the least you can do is throw intricately executed conspiracy out the window. Occam's Razor: Wouldn't it be easier to just... let it happen? Its not like the bones weren't there to pick up. "You've covered your ass now" - August 2001, at his fucking RANCH. But no, yall had to go make Machiavellis out of these motherfuckers.
Posted by: BenP at August 6, 2008 12:48 AMAmusingly, Anabasis was almost a xerox of Saddam Hussein's scheme for his invasion of Kuwait
And why is it supposed to be surprising?
Posted by: abb1 at August 6, 2008 06:09 AMI agree this administration is capable if absolutely anything. It seems to me that all thinking people now agree the war in Iraq was based on lies, the 9/11 connection, the anthrax, the WMDs. What I don't get is why there was no serious attempt to impeach.
Posted by: Mikeb302000 at August 6, 2008 07:26 AMMike Meyer: FFP and and no one to stop the monster.
This administration has made monsters out of our 18-20 year old KIDS.
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/08/squashed_by_tan/index.php
Posted by: Rupa Shah at August 6, 2008 09:07 AM"Remember The Maine."
Remember the Gult of Tonkin?
Remember the anthrax letters?
Like rings in our snouts. Led off to wars.
I kind of agree with BenP, though I'm more of a universalist on this. The details are important for history, but no one reads or remembers history. They are just exposes for a disinterested audience.
My literary equivalent is Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." We get led off, one by one, but we still want to believe what we want to believe.
Posted by: Bob In Pacifica at August 6, 2008 09:12 AM"This is the Bush administration we're talking about here....yall had to go make Machiavellis out of these motherfuckers."
After stealing two elections, launching two wars of agression, and running a Constitution-shredding and international law-shredding tyranny, and getting away with it, what would you call them?
Posted by: Bruce at August 6, 2008 02:21 PMAs all these Bush administration conspriracies are exposed now and in coming years, I hope everyone will keep in mind that there are no conspiracies and only tinfoil hat wearing wackjobs subscribe to them. So please nevermind the conspiracies. They only seem like conspiracies. They aren't really conspiracies because, obviously, if there were, then, well, all of this would be pretty pointless, wouldn't it? We'd just be living in the Matrix, wouldn't we?
Posted by: Mr. Conspiracy at August 6, 2008 03:22 PMAfter stealing two elections, launching two wars of agression, and running a Constitution-shredding and international law-shredding tyranny, and getting away with it, what would you call them?
But I think this is BenP's point - the Bush team doesn't do subtle very well at all. They get caught. And they get caught in ways that make the elaborate conspiracy theories that get woven around them seem laughable at best.
If they'd planned the 9/11 attacks and done them on purpose we'd know by now. These guys couldn't keep their hamfisted attempts to gin up a war with Iraq a secret - how the hell could they have kept a plot to blow up the towers and kill thousands of US civilians a secret for this long? If they'd done it by this point we'd have proof - probably documents written on White House letterhead with George Bush's signature attached given how these clowns seem to operate.
That's not to say that they haven't been pulling crap, but the supernatural powers attributed to them by some Truthers are just unreal. It's enough to make you believe that the Truthers have been infiltrated by folks who want to make their arguments as ridiculous as possible in order to obscure the actual conspiracies surrounding this administration. I try to live by the rule "never attribute to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by people being morons", but the Bush administration and their moronic attempts at conspiracy make that rule very hard to apply these days.
Posted by: NonyNony at August 6, 2008 04:06 PMGo McCain!
Posted by: Labiche at August 6, 2008 05:09 PM"if they'd done it by this point we'd have proof"
separate the wheat from the chaff, and you do. It was certainly more than just "letting it happen."
give it time...
Posted by: Bruce at August 6, 2008 07:30 PMI try to live by the rule "never attribute to conspiracy what can be more easily explained by people being morons", but the Bush administration and their moronic attempts at conspiracy make that rule very hard to apply these days.
How do you feel about Milosevic and Arafat?
Natural causes?
Posted by: Labiche at August 6, 2008 07:50 PM@abb1: Jon said "amusingly", not "amazingly".
Of course, now you're going to ask, "And why is it supposed to be funny?"
Posted by: Nell at August 7, 2008 05:03 AMLabiche - Arafat definitely. He was poisoned. So was Sharon. Both were poisoned by the same faction, in my opinion.
I don't know about Milosevic.
Posted by: Mr. Conspiracy at August 7, 2008 09:34 AMPaul Wellstone? the anthrax guy?
Posted by: geoff at August 7, 2008 05:34 PM
