August 21, 2008
It's Time for Suskind to Produce Tapes
The CIA agents who Ron Suskind claims admitted to him that they forged a letter linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda have publicly denied Suskind's claim. Ray Robison thinks the letter might be legit. Go read his post. There are other documents which speak to whether or not its plausibility is within the realm of reason.
Me? I've no idea. But it would be much easier to believe that, if a forgery, it has Iraqi origins rather than in the CIA. For background: see every post about Arab regimes ever written at The Jawa Report. Truthiness is just a matter of routine in Arab governments.
What's so interesting about Suskind's claim that the document is a forgery is that the major crux of his argument is that it's just too good to be true. The document links al Qaeda and WMD to Saddam Hussein. A neocons wet dream.
An obvious forgery to justify the invasion of Iraq.
But if the document was so obviously a forgery that, as Suskind claims, within a week no one was talking about it anymore, why the hell would the CIA produce it?
The CIA: smart enough to overthrow South American dictators, not smart enough to produce a believable forgery!
Come on, we're better than that people!
Now, if you want to argue that one of Iyad Allawi's cronies produced an obvious forgery I'll lower the evidence threshold. If even half the stories about the Iraqi Interim Government are true, then the ability to forge documents (especially accounting documents) was practically a job requirement.
But if you want to claim that the CIA did it then you're going to have to do more than cite two agents who claim they did not forge the documents.
Ron Suskind: if you have them on tape put up. Otherwise shut up.
