Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World:  A Story of Truth & Hope in an Age of Extremism, has stirred up something of a hornet’s nest.  Of course, this is not unexpected.  Anything published that sheds light upon Bush administration misdeeds tends to meet the same reaction:  suppress, deny, and discredit (not necessarily in that order).

In this case The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has illuminated an effort by the Bush administration to falsify a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Husein’s Iraq.  As bad as that sounds, the details of the way they went about it make it so much worse. From the August 6, 2008, Washington Post:

The book’s most contentious claims involve Tahir Jalil Habbush, the former head of intelligence in Saddam Hussein’s government in the years before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. As the deadline for war neared, U.S. and British intelligence officials arranged a series of secret meetings with Habbush in early 2003 and confronted him regarding their concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction …

…Habbush said Saddam Hussein had ended Iraq’s nuclear weapons work after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, and halted biological weapons research in 1996.

Habbush’s accounts were shared with top officials at the CIA and the White House, where they were dismissed as Iraqi deception. In subsequent meetings, Suskind writes, intelligence officials prodded Habbush for proof that the weapons programs had been abandoned.

“Ultimately, Habbush could not offer proof that weapons that didn’t exist, didn’t exist,” Suskind wrote.

After the invasion, Habbush was paid $5 million by the CIA for serving as an informant and resettled in Jordan. It was then, according to Suskind’s account, that White House officials decided to enlist his help with the alleged forgery — one suggesting a link between Saddam Hussein’s government and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attack…

Suskind states that, in September 2003, the White House directed then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to concoct a fake letter, backdated to July 2001 but bearing Habbush’s signature, claiming that Atta had been trained in Iraq for his mission. Habbush agreed to sign the letter, which was then leaked to a British journalist in December 2003, Suskind writes in the book.

According to Suskind his sources on the matter are now feeling the heat to alter or retract their accounts as laid out in The Way of the World.  Below is a video of Ron Suskind discussing the implications of his book with Countdown’s Keith Olbermann from Tuesday, August 5, 2008. For an objective review of Suskind’s book, read Louis Bayard’s review at Salon.com.
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