The Longest War (27 page)

An additional exhibit in Powell’s UN speech that was intended to prove an al-Qaeda–Saddam–WMD nexus was the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which was experimenting with crude chemical weapons in its training camp in northeastern Iraq, a facility that was described as a “poison factory” in the aerial photograph of the camp that Powell displayed in his UN presentation. However, the only reason that Ansar al-Islam could exist in that part of Kurdish Iraq was because the U.S. Air Force had been enforcing a no-fly zone in the region for more than a decade, which meant that the Pentagon had more control over that part of Kurdistan than Saddam did. Obviously well aware of the fact that Saddam did not control Kurdish Iraq, Powell said that the Iraqi dictator had a high-level spy in Ansar al-Islam. However, while Saddam may have had a spy in Ansar al-Islam, this
hardly meant that he had control
over the group.

Charles Faddis, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Kurdistan during the summer of 2002, spent many weeks investigating the poison factory as well as Ansar al-Islam and its al-Qaeda allies: “What we did night and day, seven days a week, eighteen to twenty hours a day for two months was suck every piece of data we could get on that place because what we had were reports of al-Qaeda on the ground and chem-bio work.” Faddis discovered that at their poison factory the Ansar militants were ordering large quantities of cyanide and experimenting with chemical weapons on donkeys. But he found that none of this activity was in any way linked to Saddam. Faddis told his team, “If we find intelligence that’s credible, that says that Saddam Hussein is in bed with al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam,
I will be more than happy
to be the guy who gets to press the buttons and send the report back…. The only Iraqi intelligence we ever found in that area were doing the exact same thing we were doing, which is keeping an eye on Ansar.”

When a group of reporters visited the Ansar al-Islam “poison factory” in Kurdistan a week after Powell’s UN presentation, in the words of the
New York Times
they found a “
wholly unimpressive place
.” The poison factory turned out to be a collection of some dozen mud houses without plumbing and whose electricity was provided by a generator. If this was the poison factory linking Saddam and al-Qaeda, it just didn’t seem very threatening, and if it really was that threatening, then why not just bomb it? After all, the United States controlled the airspace in the Kurdish no-fly zone. Faddis repeatedly requested to his bosses at CIA headquarters in August 2002 to mount an operation to take out the poison factory as well as the hundred or so al-Qaeda foot soldiers and the larger group of allied Ansar al-Islam fighters concentrated in the immediate vicinity of the facility, all of whose positions had been painstakingly mapped out by Faddis’s team. Faddis recalls: “We submitted a series of proposals to Washington to go get rid of these guys. … None of those proposals were accepted largely because it was concluded that it might somehow or another
derail the plans
for the invasion of Iraq and that had already taken priority.”

Two days after
Powell’s speech to the United Nations, on February 7, 2003, the administration raised the national terrorism alert from yellow or “elevated” risk to the orange “high” risk category. Health-care officials were told to be on the lookout for symptoms of biochemical contamination. Secretary
of Homeland Security Tom Ridge urged that “families in the days ahead take some time to prepare for emergency,” while officials said the attacks could come in the form of biological, chemical, or radiological weapons. The Bush administration issued
detailed advice
about how the public should prepare for a WMD attack, including stocking up with food and water, and recommended that families keep a supply of duct tape and plastic sheeting handy to seal windows in the event of a chemical or biological weapons attack. Those warnings generated a
surge in sales of plastic
sheeting and duct tape in the Washington, D.C., area and generated a number of panicky media stories. This scare about an imminent WMD terrorist attack on the United States was politically quite useful for the Bush administration, which was only six weeks away from ordering the invasion of Iraq under the flag of disarming the supposedly WMD-armed regime of the terrorist-supporting Saddam Hussein.

Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Tenet testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iraq had “
provided training in poisons and gases
to two al-Qaeda associates,” a point that Powell had also made in his UN presentation. Such claims were, of course, not checkable by the media or the American public, as they relied on highly classified intelligence, and, in any event, they could only be refuted or confirmed by invading Iraq.

What the American public did not know about Tenet’s and Powell’s crucial claim that Iraq was training al-Qaeda associates on poison gases was that it didn’t show a nexus between bin Laden, Saddam, and some of the world’s nastiest weapons but was in fact the tainted fruit of an “extraordinary rendition,” in which militants, as we have seen, were transported by American officials to countries that routinely used torture, where they would finally divulge whatever secrets they had supposedly been keeping from their American interrogators.

In December 2001, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan militant who had run the al-Qaeda–affiliated Khaldan training camp, was captured in Pakistan. The two FBI agents at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan who were assigned to interrogate Libi sought advice from Jack Cloonan, a veteran FBI investigator who was deeply immersed in al-Qaeda because of his extensive interrogations of three members of the group who were already in American custody. Cloonan told his two FBI colleagues, “I don’t care what anyone else says, I would like you to do the following, which is
advise al-Libi of his rights
.” Cloonan briefed the two agents that Libi was an important person because of his position as
“amir,” or commander, of the Khaldan camp, and someone they should be looking to get as much cooperation from as possible, as they would from any other suspect in any other case.

Under no duress, Libi spoke to the agents
about Richard Reid
, the so-called shoe bomber, who had recently been arrested in Boston after trying to blow up an American Airlines flight over the Atlantic. Reid had trained in the Khaldan camp under Libi, as had the supposed twentieth hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, so naturally what the Libyan had to say about these two men was of great interest to investigators. Libi also said there were no ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Several days into Libi’s interrogation, an Arabic-speaking CIA official named
Albert burst into
Libi’s cell and in front of one of the FBI interrogators yelled at the prisoner, “You know where you are going. And while you’re there I’m going to find your mother and fuck her.”
The CIA then rendered Libi
to Egypt.

To improve his chances of better treatment once in Egypt’s notorious prisons, Libi fed his interrogators a number of fairy tales, including the nonsensical idea that al-Qaeda had cooperated with Russian organized crime to smuggle “
canisters containing nuclear materials into New York
.” But most importantly he told them that bin Laden had sent two operatives to Iraq to learn about biological and chemical weapons.

Because Libi’s story encapsulated the key arguments for the Iraq War, his tale was picked up by President Bush in a keynote speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, in which Bush laid out his rationale for the coming conflict with Iraq, saying, “We’ve learned that
Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members
in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” But once he was back in American custody, on February 14, 2004,
Libi recanted
what he had falsely told his Egyptian jailors. Libi told his U.S. interrogators that he had “
fabricated
” his tale of the Saddam–al-Qaeda–poison connection to the Egyptians following “physical abuse and threats of torture.”

Several months before any of the false claims of that connection based on Libi’s coerced statements were first made by Bush officials, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that Libi was likely making everything up. On February 22, 2002, DIA noted that Libi “
lacks specific details
on Iraq’s involvement. … It is possible he does not know any further details: it is more likely that he is intentionally misleading the debriefers.” The CIA followed that report up with its own six months later, finding that “questions
persist about [Libi’s] forthrightness and truthfulness … he seems to have fabricated information.” Two key American intelligence agencies had raised serious doubts about Libi’s reliability yet those concerns were either not briefed to senior Bush officials or were simply ignored, despite the fact that this was the
only
evidence offered to the American public that made the key argument for the war—that Saddam had WMDs and that his regime had instructed members of al-Qaeda about their use.

Despite the absence of evidence that Saddam and bin Laden were allied, senior Bush officials maintained an almost theological certainty that they were joined at the hip. Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC’s Tim Russert in September 2003 that “[Iraq] was the
geographic base
of the terrorists that have had us under assault for many years, most especially on 9/11.” Cheney never corrected this egregious misstatement of the facts. During the same interview, Russert asked Cheney if Saddam had any role in 9/11, to which Cheney replied, “We don’t know,” which was a curious thing to say, since the most wide-ranging criminal investigation in American history had long before determined that Saddam had had no role in the attacks.

On June 16, 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 inquiry staff report was released, and it concluded that there was no operational relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The report also established that the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s cell phone records showed that he was in Florida at the time of his supposed meeting with the Iraqi spy in Prague on April 9, 2001. Calls from Atta’s cell were made
multiple times
on April 6, 9, 10, and 11 using cell phone transmitting sites in Florida.

The day after the 9/11 staff report came out—the conclusions had been trumpeted in a front-page story in the
New York Times
—an unusually animated Cheney was interviewed by Gloria Borger of CNBC about the supposed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection and, in particular, the supposed meeting in Prague between Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent.

CHENEY:
We have never
been able to confirm that nor have we been able to knock it down. We just don’t know.

BORGER: Well, this report says it didn’t happen.

CHENEY: No, this report says they haven’t found any evidence.

BORGER: That it happened.

CHENEY: Right.

BORGER: But you haven’t found the evidence that it happened either, have you?

CHENEY: No. All we have is that one report from the Czechs. We just don’t know.

BORGER: So does this put it to rest for you or not on Atta?

CHENEY: It doesn’t—it doesn’t add anything from my perspective. I mean, I still am a skeptic. I can’t refute the Czech claim; I can’t prove the Czech claim. I just don’t know. It’s the nature of the intelligence business lots of times.

The claim that Atta had met in Prague with the Iraqi intelligence agent had just been definitively refuted by the 9/11 Commission (an inquiry that the Bush administration had fought to prevent from ever happening). And by the time that Cheney spoke on CNBC, the evidence that Atta could not have been in Prague to meet with the Iraqi agent was already well-known to the U.S. government. According to the 2003 FBI’s “
Hijackers Timeline
,” Atta had cashed a check for eight hundred dollars at a SunTrust bank in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on April 4, 2001, and a week later had rented an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. The three-hundred-page FBI timeline painstakingly retraced the hijackers’ steps in the United States and found no evidence that Atta was out of the country at the time of his supposed meeting in Prague with the Iraqi agent. By October 2003, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the very same Iraqi intelligence agent who was supposed to have met with Atta, was in American custody, and he
denied ever meeting him
.

When Bush was asked by reporters about the 9/11 Commission’s findings in June 2004 that there was no “collaborative relationship” between al-Qaeda and Saddam, he resorted to tautology: “The reason I keep insisting that
there was a relationship
between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda; because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”

Not according to Saddam Hussein, who had been captured six months earlier. Appointed to be his interrogator was George Piro, a Lebanese-American who, unusually for an FBI agent, spoke excellent Arabic. Piro, a thirty-six-year-old avid student of Middle Eastern history who had already served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, would spend the next seven months with the former Iraqi dictator, speaking with him every day for anywhere between five and seven hours. Using standard (noncoercive) interrogation techniques, Piro built up a strong rapport with Saddam, even giving him
some of his mom’s
home-baked cookies
when the Iraqi celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday.

Several months into his interrogations, Piro
elicited the real story
behind Iraq’s supposed WMD. Saddam told him that they had all been destroyed in the mid-1990s by UN inspectors, or by the Iraqis themselves, but this was kept secret to protect the regime’s aura of power among both its internal and external enemies. During the course of one of their discussions on June 28, 2004, Piro probed Saddam about his putative connections to al-Qaeda. The former Iraqi dictator dismissed the idea, explaining that bin Laden was a zealot with whom his regime did not cooperate. Just as Bush was assuring the world that al-Qaeda and Saddam had a relationship, the FBI, and through it the entire U.S. intelligence community, was confirming for the umpteenth time that there was no such thing.