Wesley Clark: Phone "Call on Sep11th" told him to pin attack on Saddam

Iraq: Schemers have their way

Asia Times -Jul 17, 2003 By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - With demands for a full-scale investigation of the manipulation of intelligence by the administration of President George W Bush mounting steadily, it appears increasingly clear that key officials and their allies outside the administration decided to use the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks themselves.

Within the administration, the principals appear to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and his national-security advisor, I Lewis Libby, among others in key posts in the National Security Council and the State Department.

Outside the administration, key figures included close friends of both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard Perle and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey - both members of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank Gaffney, head of the arms industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and William Kristol, editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among others.

PNAC, which is based on the fifth floor of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) building in downtown Washington, was founded in 1997 with the signing of a statement of principles calling for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity", signed by 25 prominent neo-conservatives and right-wingers, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Libby as well as several others who are now senior Bush administration officials.

A close examination of the public record indicates that all of these individuals - both in and outside the administration - were actively preparing the ground within days, even hours, after the September 11 attacks, for an eventual attack on Iraq, whether or not it had any role in the attacks or any connection to al-Qaeda.

The challenge, in their view, was to convince the public that such links either did indeed exist or were sufficiently likely to exist that a preventive strike against Iraq was warranted. Their success in that respect was stunning, although, in order to pull it off, they also had to distort and exaggerate the evidence being collected by US intelligence agencies.

A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq with the September 11 attacks and al-Qaeda surfaced last month in a televised interview of General Wesley Clark on the popular public-affairs program Meet the Press. In answer to a question, Clark asserted, "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after September 11, to pin September 11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

"It came from the White House, it came from other people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on September 11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

While Clark has not yet identified who called him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney and Kristol were using the same language in their media appearances on September 11 and over the following weeks. "This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," Perle told the Washington Post on September 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments."

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printed from Wesley Clark: Phone "Call on Sep11th" told him to pin attack on Saddam on 2004-04-29 21:17:10