The US
Senate's retiring Armed Services chairman says a claim used in 2003 to justify
the US-led invasion of Iraq was based on a "fiction." Carl Levin says
an alleged al Qaeda-Iraqi meeting in Prague never took place.
Levin told
the Senate in plenary session that a CIA letter proved that ahead of the 2001
hijacked-plane attacks on New York and Washington there had been no meeting in
Prague between the Hamburg-based lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi spy.
Other
records indicated that Atta was "almost certainly in the United States at
the time of the purported meeting in Prague," said Levin, who is chairman
of the Senate's Armed Services Committee.
He told the
Senate late on Thursday that former president George W. Bush and especially
Bush's then vice president Dick Cheney "misled" US citizens ahead of
the 2003 invasion by claiming that the September 11, 2001, attacks had aconnection with the then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
"Of
course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al Qaeda were fiction,"
Levin said.
Public
swayed by misinformation
"There
was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq
in the public mind with the horror of the September 11 attacks. That campaign
succeeded," said Levin.
He also
cited surveys from 2003 that showed that many Americans believed Saddam Hussein
was involved in the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks.
The letter
from current CIA director John Brennan released by Levin stated that there was
"not one USG (US government counterterrorism) or FBI expert" who had
evidence to show that Atta had indeed been in the Czech capital.
"In
fact the analysis has been quite the opposite," Brennan wrote.
CIA cable
warned against invasion
Levin said
he had long sought declassification [publication] of a CIA cable dated March
13, 2003 that warned the then Bush administration against propagating the
hijacker-Iraq theory, but to no avail.
 |
| Al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell, with Atta (lower middle) |
This had
followed a December 2001 television appearance by Cheney who claimed that it
was "pretty well confirmed" a Prague encounter had taken place
between Atta and senior Iraqi agent Ahmad al-Anian months before the hijackers
attacked.
Far from
Cheney's claim that it was 'pretty well confirmed,' there was "almost no
evidence that such a meeting took place," Levin told the Senate, adding
that it was an unsubstantiated, "single source" rumor.
Czech
agents under pressure
Levin also
cited a memoir published early this year by the former head of Czech
counterintelligence, Jiri Ruzek, who wrote that US officials had pressured
Czech intelligence to confirm that such a meeting had taken place.
Rusek wrote
that from a US perspective Czech agents had not provided the "'right
intelligence output'."
"They
wanted to mine [extract] certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an
excuse for military action," Rusek wrote.
FBI
officials quoted by Reuters late on Thursday said Atta was probably in Florida
in early April 2001 -- preparing for the September 11 attacks -- and that they
had found no evidence of his traveling in Europe around that time.
'False
statements'
The conclusion,
Levin said, was that future US leaders "must not commit our sons and
daughters to battle on the basis of false statements."
The 2003
US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein cost the lives of more than 4,689
soldiers, mostly American, between 2003 and a combat troop withdrawal in 2009.
Civilian
deaths in Iraq since 2003 are put at at least 133,000 by the website Iraq Body
Count.
Senator
Levin's remarks followed the Senate's release of a damning report on CIA interrogations of al Qaeda suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda
hijackers, using four passenger planes, murdered nearly 3,000 people in New
York and Washington in the attacks.
ipj/tj (AFP, Reuters, AP)
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