The "smoking gun" Iraqi memo and Con Coughlin.
Continuing with the theme of hackery, although on a scale far, far removed from that involving Peaches Geldof, comes the allegations from Ron Suskind in his latest book that the White House ordered the CIA in the middle of 2003 to forge a letter from Iraq's former intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush, which was subsequently used as the smoking gun to prove links between Saddam Hussein's regime and al-Qaida. The letter claimed that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September the 11th attackers, had trained in Baghdad at the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal's camp, and that the Iraqi regime was deeply involved in the 9/11 plot.The letter was the crudest of forgeries and has subsequently been exposed as such. It is however the first time that allegations have been made that the forging of the letter was authorised at the very highest levels of both the US government and the CIA itself. Suskind minces no words and suggests that is impeachment material. All sides, it must be said, have denied it, and there are reasons to believe, as suggested in the Salon review of Suskind's book, that this might be one of those stories that seem too good to be true because they are, more of which in the conclusion.
The same must be said for those who believed the provenance of the letter, especially considering which journalist was responsible for its publishing. Rather than going to an American source with the letter, perhaps considering the fallout that was yet to come over the leaking of dubious intelligence to Judith Miller of the New York Times and others, the memo was given to a British journalist, the Telegraph's Con Coughlin.
It's by no means the first time that Con Coughlin has been linked either with the security services or with putting into circulation dubious material which subsequently turned out to be fabricated or inaccurate. Back in 1995 Coughlin claimed that the son of the Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi was involved in an attempted international currency fraud. Served with a libel writ, the Telegraph was forced to admit that its source for the story was none other than MI6, with the paper first being informed of the story during a lunch with the then Conservative foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind. Coughlin was briefed further by another MI6 officer on two occasions before the story was subsequently published.
Despite in this instance Coughlin's links with the security establishment coming back to haunt him, neither did it seemingly alter his friendly relations with them nor their apparent diligence in supplying him with little more in some circumstances than open propaganda. As well as being handed the forged smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaida, he also happened to come across the fabled source for the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to use them. To call it a fantastical tale would not put be putting it too histrionically: Coughlin talks of a DHL flight targeted before he landed in Baghdad by "Saddam's Fedayeen (a Wikipedia article worth treating with the utmost scepticism due to the almost complete lack of sourcing)", that almost mythical organisation supposed to fight to the death for Saddam that didn't put up much of a fight during the invasion, let alone in the months following the fall of the Ba'ath party. The Iraqi colonel claims that weapons of mass destruction were distributed to the army prior to the invasion, but were never used because the army itself didn't put up a fight. It's strange that 5 years on none of these batches of WMD have ever been discovered, despite their apparent diffusion around the country.
Since then, Coughlin's sources have been no less convinced that we're all doomed. Back in November of 2006 Coughlin claimed that Iran is training the next generation of al-Qaida leaders, despite the organisation's view that Iran's brand of fundamentalist Shia Islam is heretical. Allegations have been made that Iran has been supplying help to the Taliban, despite previously helping with its overthrow, but even in the wildest dreams of conspiracy theorists and neo-conservative whack-jobs no one seriously believes that Iran would ever help al-Qaida, let alone train its next leaders. The nearest that anyone can really get to claiming links between Iran and al-Qaida is that some of its members are either hiding there or that its fighters have been using the country as a transit point.
In January of last year Coughlin was back with another exclusive, claiming that North Korea was helping Iran get ready to conduct its own nuclear test, after NK's own pitiful attempt had gone off "successfully" the previous October. This one was not quite as fantastical or laughable as the one linking Iran and al-Qaida, but was still murky in the extreme. The NIE intelligence assessment the following November concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear programme 4 years previously. That said, we should be cautious: the Israeli attack on the supposed Syrian nuclear processing plant came after evidence that it was modelled on the North Korean plant, and there are allegations along with that of heavy North Korean involvement in the operating and building of the plant, if it indeed, it must also be said, it was a nuclear site at all.
The latest revelations that Coughlin's 2003 report may well have originated from the very highest levels of US government only increases the level of scepticism with which any of his articles should be treated. At times journalists have to rely on security service figures to break stories which would otherwise never set the light of day, but as David Leigh wrote in an article from 2000, the very least that they should do if this unavoidable is be honest about the origins of such reports. It's one thing to get into bed temporarily with the intelligence community, it's quite another to act for years as their voice in the press, as Coughlin certainly appears to have done, spreading the most warped and questionable of their propaganda. As the Guardian reported in 2002 after the Telegraph admitted to the role of MI6 in their story on Ghaddafi, Coughlin was likely to recover from the indignity due to his good contacts within MI6. That certainly seems to have been exactly the case. Most humourously though, this was how Coughlin opened his commentary on the 2003 Iraqi memo:
For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
As Coughlin must have certainly knew it was. Just how too good to be true has been left to Ron Suskind to expose.
Labels: Bush administration, CIA, Con Coughlin, forgeries, hackery, intelligence agencies, Iran, Iraq disaster, propaganda, Ron Suskind, Telegraph, Telegraph-watch
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