The Other Half of the Letter

(updated below)

Everyone is buzzing this morning about Ron Suskind's claim--in his new book--that a letter purportedly written to Saddam Hussien by one of his intelligence officers in 2001 was in fact a forgery authorized by the White House. The letter was provided to a reporter for The Sunday Telegraph (of London) by a member of the Iraqi interim government and was first written about in December of 2003, at around the time Saddam was captured.

All the commentary I've seen so far--from the Politico article that broke the story and blogs that have linked to it--has focused on the first part of the letter that describes Atta's training, but no one seems to be mentioning the more intriguing part of the letter. According to Con Coughlin, the reporter who obtained the document:

The second item [in the letter] explains how Iraqi intelligence, helped by "a small team from the al-Qaeda organisation", arranged for an (unspecified) shipment from Niger to reach Baghdad by way of Libya and Syria.

Iraqi officials believe this is a reference to the controversial shipments of uranium ore that Iraq acquired from Niger to aid Saddam in his efforts to develop an atom bomb.

Now, as everyone knows, Bush famously trumpeted the uranium from Niger claim in his State of the Union speech just prior to the invasion of Iraq, and the White House later came under fire when Joe Wilson went public and disputed that claim in July 2003.

So this letter, which appears to support two highly dubious pre-war claims by the Bush administration--the link between Saddam and al Qaeda and the Niger uranium claim--is "discovered" in December of 2003. I'm not sure what proof, if any, Suskind has that the White House was responsible for this letter, but if that claim is true, it's a HUGE deal.

UPDATE: Ron Suskind himself now has a post up at the Huffington Post. He writes:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

So that's Suskind's version of events. I'll be curious to see what evidence he has to back it up. If this allegation is true (and that's a big "if" at this point), then the letter was intended solely for political purposes. By the fall of 2003, we had already invaded Iraq and declared "Mission Accomplished." The issue at that point was the looming political fallout as the original case for war crumbled.