Could I Have Been Right?

(updated below)

The other day I questioned Ron Suskind's claim that the Bush administration had forged a letter to Saddam Hussein in late 2003 in order to validate their pre-war claims. I pointed out that the document in question was such an obvious forgery that it seemed hard to believe that even this administration could be so incompetent. I ended the post with this attempt at humor:

Then again, maybe they put someone like Doug Feith in charge of the operation. That might explain it.

Well, sure enough, today Philip Giraldi at The American Conservative reports the following:

An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.

The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.

My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.

Now, I have no idea who Philip Giraldi is or whether his source is as reliable as he claims, but when you think about it, this scenario actually makes much more sense than the one laid out in Suskind's book.

At around the time the Habbush forgery was generated--the fall of 2003--Feith was busy preparing an intelligence report for Congress later dubbed the "Feith Memo." That highly classified memo was a hackish attempt to string together all the raw intelligence data suggesting an al Qaeda/Iraq link (much of which was unreliable or outright discredited) into one document in order to make the case that there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. It was created by Feith's office and did not reflect the views of any of the real intelligence agencies. In November of 2003, the memo was leaked--for obvious political purposes--to The Weekly Standard, which obediently printed up a hyperventilating cover story entitled "Case Closed."

Right wingers instantly ran with the story, but for the most part, the mainstream media did not. Reporters at the major news outlets were no doubt waived off the story by their sources in the intelligence community. Ironically, the Pentagon itself threw cold water on the story almost instantly, issuing a tersely-worded press release stating that reports about the Feith Memo were "inaccurate," that it contained only "raw" intelligence data, and that any "analysis" in the memo should be disregarded. The Powers that Be at the DOD were apparently well aware that Feith was a moron and had no desire to endorse his conclusions.

This highly dismissive DOD press release provoked an incredulous response from Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard, who had first reported the existence of the Feith Memo and clearly thought he had found something that--in his words--"changes everything." A few weeks later, NEWSWEEK finally did a story on the Feith Memo, but only to tear it and The Weekly Standard story apart. Slate then followed suit. All this provoked a hilarious hissy-fit by the editors of The Weekly Standard, who published an editorial lashing out at both the mainstream media (for ignoring their blockbuster story) and the Bush Administration itself (for "shying away from an opportunity to substantiate its own case before the American people and the world.")

That editorial was dated December 8, 2003--just a week before the existence of the Habbush memo was first disclosed by British reporter Con Coughlin.

Now it's entirely possible--and this is just speculation--that the Habbush forgery was intended as part of a concerted "roll out" of evidence designed to buttress the administration's pre-war claims. The leak of the Feith Memo, followed one month later by the discovery of the Habbush memo--which seems designed to validate the conclusions of the Feith Memo--is certainly suspicious.

Moreover, the suggestion that Cheney ordered Feith's office to create the forgery makes sense. Cheney was clearly the member of the administration most interested in validating these particular pre-war claims. In January of 2008, well after the Feith Memo and The Weekly Standard's article had been discredited, Cheney did an interview with the Rocky Mountain News in which he cited the article as the "best source of information available" about the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda--a claim he was later publicy rebuked for by George Tenet. And as we know now from the Scooter Libby trial, Cheney was the driving force behind the administration's effort to push back against Joe Wilson on the Niger uranium issue.

Cheney is just the sort of person who would come up with a plan to forge a document to validate his position on these two key issues (and think that he was smart enough to fool people with it). And Feith was clearly his go-to guy. Cheney was the only official to ever cite the Feith Memo favorably, and I would bet my left arm that he was responsible for leaking it to The Weekly Standard in the first place.

And finally, if this was a Cheney/Feith operation, it would explain why it was so incompetently executed. Remember, this is the guy General Tommy Franks famously referred to as "the stupidest f*cking guy on the planet." And Cheney thought highly enough of Feith to put him in charge of his own personal intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, which says all you need to know about Cheney's own judgment. If Cheney and Feith were behind this, they wouldn't have let anyone else in the administration in on it, particularly the other intelligence agencies whom they didn't trust. That would explain why, when the Habbush memo surfaced, the real intelligence experts quickly dismissed it as a forgery and waived members of the media off of it. They would have had no idea it was planted by their own government.

Again, I don't know if any of this is true. But I do find Giraldi's version of events more plausible than Suskind's.

UPDATE: Joe Conason sheds some more light on the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the Habbush memo. He's right that the involvement of Allawi makes it slightly more likely that the CIA was involved. I still find it hard to believe that anyone but a complete moron would have thought this forgery would fool anyone.