members, and insisted that the regime itself had no connection to the 9/11 plot.
Joint Inquiry cochair Bob Graham did not share that view. What Zubaydah is reported to have said about the princes, he told the authors, is credible. Graham has said publicly, meanwhile, that the hijackers “received assistance from a foreign government which further facilitated their ability to be so lethal.” The assistance, a very senior Committee source told the authors, “went to major names in the Saudi hierarchy.”
In all, more than forty U.S. senators clamored for the release of the censored pages. Committee cochairs Graham and Shelby aside, they included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Sam Brownback, Olympia Snowe, and Pat Roberts.
Nothing happened.
Graham, with his long experience in the field as member and cochair not only of the 9/11 probe but of the Intelligence Committee, has continued to voice his anger over the censorship even in retirement. President Bush, he wrote in 2004, had “engaged in a cover-up … to protect not only the agencies that failed but also America’s relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.… He has done so by misclassifying information on national security data. While the information may be embarrassing or politically damaging, its revelation would not damage national security.”
Graham’s Republican counterpart on Congress’s probe, Senator Shelby, concluded independently that virtually all the censored pages were “being kept secret for reasons other than national security.”
“It was,” Graham thought, “as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” In Graham’s view, Bush’s role in suppressing important information about 9/11, along with other transgressions, should have led to his impeachment and removal from office.
Within weeks of his inauguration in 2009, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, made a point of receiving bereaved relatives of 9/11. The widow of one of those who died at the World Trade Center, Kristen Breitweiser, has said that she brought the new President’s attention to the infamous censored section of the Joint Inquiry Report. Obama told her, she said afterward, that he was willing to get the suppressed material released. As of this writing, two years later, the chapter remains classified.
“If the twenty-eight pages were to be made public,” said one of the officials who was privy to them before President Bush ordered their removal, “I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight.”
THIRTY-FOUR
THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT BLURRED THE TRUTH ABOUT THE Saudi role. By the time it was published in July 2004, more than a year had passed since the invasion of Iraq, a country that—the report said—had nothing to do with 9/11.
In the eighteen months before the invasion, however, the Bush administration had persistently seeded the notion that—Saddam Hussein’s other sins aside—there
Polls suggest that the publicity about Iraq’s supposed involvement affected the degree to which the U.S. public came to view Iraq as an enemy deserving retribution. Before the invasion, a Pew Research poll found that 57 percent of those polled believed Hussein had helped the 9/11 terrorists. Forty-four percent of respondents to a Knight-Ridder poll had gained the impression that “most” or “some” of the hijackers had been Iraqi. In fact, none were. In the wake of the invasion, a
Of the many reports and rumors circulated alleging an Iraqi role, two dominated. One, which got by far the most exposure, had it that Mohamed Atta had met in spring 2001 in Prague with a named Iraqi intelligence officer. The Iraqi officer later denied it, a fact that on its own might carry no weight. The best evidence, meanwhile, is that Atta was in the United States at the time.
A second allegation, persistently propagated before and after 9/11 by Laurie Mylroie, a scholar associated with the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, proposed that Ramzi Yousef—the terrorist responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—had been an Iraqi agent using a stolen identity. Investigation by others, including the FBI, indicated that the speculation is unsupported by hard evidence.
Mylroie, meanwhile, appeared to believe that Saddam Hussein had been behind multiple terrorist attacks over a ten-year period, from the East Africa embassy bombings to Oklahoma City and 9/11. “My view,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, “is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq.” Mylroie’s claim about Yousef nevertheless proved durable.
None of the speculative leads suggesting an Iraqi link to the attacks proved out. “We went back ten years,” said former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer, who looked into the matter at the request of Director Tenet. “We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [al Qaeda] and Saddam.”
A CIA report entitled “Iraqi Support for Terrorism,” completed in January 2003, was the last in-depth analysis the Agency produced prior to the invasion of Iraq in March. “The Intelligence Community,” it concluded, “has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al Qaeda strike.”
After exhaustive trawls of the record, official probes have concluded that senior Bush administration officials applied inordinate pressure to try to establish that there was an Iraqi connection to 9/11, and that American torture of al Qaeda prisoners was a result of such pressure. CIA analysts noted that “questions regarding al Qaeda’s ties to the Iraqi regime were among the first presented to senior operational planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed following his capture.” KSM was one of those most persistently subjected to torture.
The CIA’s Charles Duelfer, who was in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials after the invasion, recalled being “asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used” on a detainee who had handled contacts with terrorist groups and might have knowledge of links between the Hussein regime and al Qaeda.
The notion was turned down. Duelfer noted, however, that it had come from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA)” who thought the detainee’s interrogation had been “too gentle.” Two U.S. intelligence officers, meanwhile, have said flatly that the suggestion came from Vice President Cheney’s office.
“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent and why extreme methods were used,” a former senior intelligence official said in 2009. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaeda and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Paul Burney, told military investigators that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. “We were not successful,” Burney said in interviews for the Army’s inspector general, but “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
In the absence of evidence, according to the author and Pulitzer winner Ron Suskind, it was in one instance fabricated. Suskind has reported that in fall 2003—when the U.S. administration was still struggling to justify the invasion of Iraq—the White House asked the CIA to collaborate in the forgery of a document stating that hijacker leader Atta had spent time training in Iraq.
The forgery took the form of a purported memo to Saddam Hussein from the former head of the Iraqi intelligence service. The memo was dated two months before 9/11—the actual former intelligence chief was prevailed upon to put his signature to it long after its supposed writing—and it stated that Atta had just spent time training in Iraq “to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy.”
The story of this fakery raised a brief media storm and a spate of denials. Rebuttals included a carefully phrased statement from Suskind’s primary source, a former head of the CIA’s Near East Division named Rob Richer—to which Suskind responded by publishing a transcript of one of his interviews with Richer.
Another former CIA officer, Philip Giraldi, meanwhile, placed responsibility for the fabrication on the
