New Ron Suskind Claim Strains Credibility

August 20, 5:18 PMNational Defense ExaminerRay Robison

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 Author Ron Suskind claims in his new book "The Way of the World" that a letter reported to connect the Saddam regime to al Qaeda is a fake and was crafted by the CIA according to two former CIA officers. He recently repeated his claim on the MSNBC show countdown. As Keith Olbermann introduced the author he noted that in preparing for the segment MSNBC attempted to contact the two CIA officials cited by Suskind.

Former CIA officials Rob Richer, speaking for himself and on behalf of John Maguire (apparently at Maguire's request) denied to MSNBC that they had anything to do with the Iraqi letter nor could they attest to its' origins.

Ron Suskind claimed to Olbermann that he had taped evidence of the conversations. Now would be a good time for Mr. Suskind to produce the evidence that his two “witnesses” provided him. This denial casts grave doubts about Suskind's claim.

The problem for Mr. Suskind is that there is every reason to believe that the former CIA officials are telling the truth. My book Both In One Trench: Saddam's Secret Terror Documents deals with that letter and supporting evidence that it was genuine.

To summarize, shortly after the invasion of Iraq journalist Con Coughlin writing for The Telegraph revealed that he had been provided with a document from what he called a reliable, Iraqi source which expressly showed Mohammad Atta, the 9/11 attack ringleader, training for the mission in Iraq with Saddam's knowledge. Coughlin claimed that the letter formed the first “proof” that Saddam was involved with 9/11.

I contacted Coughlin while researching the book and he stood by his report as of mid-2007. It is doubtful that many other people have seen the original of this document (including myself) since even Coughlin didn't know where it had gotten to after he saw it when I talked to him.

But to the point, the man identified in the document as the originator is Tahir Jalil Habbush al Tikriti, the former Director of Saddam's intelligence service known as the IIS. The document purportedly was from the Director to Saddam's office. It reported that Mohammad Atta had completed his training.

While my coauthors and I have not seen it, we find the contents of the document (as described by Coughlin) to be within the bounds of reason based on our research of other captured Iraqi documents. Most notably, we translated and analyzed a notebook kept by an IIS agent in which he detailed meetings between the IIS director and some notably terrorist leaders. According to that document, which includes transcriptions of some of these meetings, in 1999 alone the Director of the IIS met with two men, one named Fazlur Rahman and one named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who are both strongly tied to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

As we reported for Fox News these men came to Baghdad to meet with high level regime officials. Hekmatyar, a notorious terror camp operator who would later pledge his group to Usama bin Laden came to Baghdad requesting help with the training of terrorists. Fazlur Rahman came to meet with Saddam on behalf of Mulla Omar, leader of the Taliban. He negotiated for diplomatic assistance and in key meetings made secret military and intelligence agreements with the Saddam regime.

Although we don't know the full details we have a meeting record of the IIS director with Fazlur Rahman who helped create the Taliban, whose politico/terror groups provided the religious edict to Usama bin Laden for his 1998 fatwa, and who helped smuggle Taliban and al Qaeda leadership out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan during the US invasion. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 would later be caught in the residence of a supporter of one of these jihadi organizations influenced by Fazlur Rahman.

Fazlur Rahman was at the very least a logistical supporter of 9/11. Because we can place him with the IIS director along with Hekmatyar who runs terror camps, there is absolutely no reason to preclude the letter described by Coughlin from being legitimate.

Mr. Suskind is the latest in a long line of media figures who have tried to discredit this document. Since Suskind's claim goes against the statements made to MSNBC by his supposed witnesses and since the letter is credible when compared to information reveled in other Iraqi source documents, Suskind has a lot of explaining to do. He could start by producing those tapes.