"Hard to get a good case": Early Attempts to Link 9/11 and Iraq

Last week, outragedmoderates.org released DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes from meetings with Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of 9/11. The notes, obtained under FOIA, show that at early as 2:40 PM on September 11th, Rumsfeld was attempting to use the day's attacks as a justification for invading Iraq (although he did concede that it would be "[h]ard to get a good case"). The following is a brief timeline of the Bush administration’s discussions, during the month after the 9/11 attacks, about invading Iraq as a response to the tragedy.

September 11, 2001
During a 2:40 PM meeting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld instructed members of his staff to find the "[b]est info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden] . . . Tasks Jim Haynes to talk w/ PW [presumably Paul Wolfowitz] for additional support v/v USIS & connection w/ UBL . . . Hard to get a good case . . . Need to move swiftly . . . Near term target needs . . . Go massive - sweep it all up - Things related and not . . . Need to do so to get anything useful." [Flickr photo page]

Retired general Wesley Clark, appearing on Meet the Press on June 15, 2003: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein . . . it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. 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.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence." [FAIR.org]

September 12, 2001
Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack that on September 12, "in the inner circle of Bush's war cabinet, Rumsfeld asked if the terrorist attacks did not present an 'opportunity' to launch against Iraq." [Slate]

In his book Against All Enemies, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said that on September 12, he "walked into a series of discussions about Iraq . . . Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq." That evening, President Bush told Clarke to "see if Saddam did this." Clarke responded: "Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," and said "we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq," but Bush "testily" urged Clarke to "[l]ook into Iraq, Saddam . . . “ [San Francisco Chronicle], and to "[s]ee if he’s linked in any way.” [9/11 Commission Report, p. 334]

September 15, 2001
President Bush met with top advisors at Camp David. According the 9/11 Commission Report: “Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq during ‘this round’ of the war on terrorism . . . Secretary Powell recalled that Wolfowitz--not Rumsfeld--argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked. Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. ‘Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with . . . And he saw this as one way of using the event as a way to deal with the Iraq problem.’ Powell said that President Bush did not give Wolfowitz’s argument ‘much weight.’ President Bush told Bob Woodward that the decision not to invade Iraq was made at the morning session on September 15.” [9/11 Commission Report, p. 335]

September 17, 2001
Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memo titled “Preventing More Events,” which argued that “if there were even a 10 percent chance Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, maximum priority should be placed on eliminating that threat.” [9/11 Commission Report, p. 335] (Thad: Wolfowitz’s “10 percent” logic has to be the single most absurd argument that was ever made for invading Iraq. Does that mean that if there is a 90% chance Al Qaeda did it, and a 10 percent chance Iraq did it, we should place “maximum priority” on Iraq?)

September 20, 2001
Undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith prepared a memo which the 9/11 Commission Report would characterize as follows: “[T]he author expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. The author suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq. Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists." [9/11 Commission Report, p. 559]

British PM Tony Blair visited the White House to meet with President Bush, and the two leaders discussed the global conflict ahead. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “[w]hen Blair asked about Iraq, the President replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some members of his administration, he commented, had expressed a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the decisions.” [9/11 Commission Report, p. 336] Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, later claims that during the meeting, President Bush tried to convince British PM Tony Blair to support an invasion of Iraq. According to an article in Vanity Fair, "Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan." Blair would later claim that that “no decisions had been taken” about Iraq until just before the invasion began in March 2003. [The Observer]

In an address to the Amerian people before a Joint Session of Congress the night of the 20th, President Bush blamed Al Qaeda for the 9/11 attacks, and the only mention of Iraq is a comparison to the first Gulf War: “This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion.” [WhiteHouse.gov]

Late September and October, 2001
During the weeks after September 11, Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, created two secret intelligence groups, the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (also called the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group [Graphic: New York Times]). “The eighteen members of the Special Plans staff prepared strategies on a range of issues that America would face after an invasion: repairing Iraq’s economy and oil industry, the training of a new police force, war-crimes trials, the reorganization of the Iraqi government . . . The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was devoted to alternative intelligence analysis; it employed a rotating staff of two people who were asked to read intelligence data provided by the C.I.A. in order to find unexamined connections between state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups . . . Most of the work of this unit was soon focused on looking for evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam.” [New Yorker]

"It Didn't Work"

In this week's National Review, William F. Buckley, the influential conservative magazine's founder, says that "[o]ne can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."

On his excellent blog Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald compares the conservative blogosphere's reactions to Buckley's comments with its reactions to the incredibly similar comments Howard Dean made two months ago.

The Guardian Covers Cambone's 9/11 Notes

If you're looking for DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes from the afternoon of 9/11, please go to the post "DoD Staffer's Notes from 9/11 Obtained Under FOIA."

The British newspaper The Guardian discussed the notes today in the article "Blogger bares Rumsfeld's post 9/11 orders" (the story is also running in the paper's International section now). Paul Krugman also cited the documents in his New York Times column "Osama, Saddam and the Ports," and Andrew Sullivan covered them on his blog for TIME. I'd like to thank these media outlets and everyone else who has helped get the story out (and everyone who still is), including Opinio Juris, Democracy Arsenal, The Washington Note, Securing America, The Moderate Voice, War and Piece, CrooksandLiars, The Raw Story, AfterDowningStreet.org, Common Dreams, Disinfo.com, Democratic Underground, Cryptome, The Project for the Old American Century, and fellow Queens residents Watching America.

AP: Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement

This is an interesting twist in the controversy over the takeover of American ports by a state-owned company based in the United Arab Emirates. The existence of a secret deal is especially troubling in light of Scott McClellan's claim that the President had only learned about the deal after it had already been approved.

"The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

As part of the $6.8 billion purchase, state-owned Dubai Ports World agreed to reveal records on demand about "foreign operational direction" of its business at U.S. ports, the documents said. Those records broadly include details about the design, maintenance or operation of ports and equipment.

The administration did not require Dubai Ports to keep copies of business records on U.S. soil, where they would be subject to court orders. It also did not require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate U.S. government requests. Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries."

Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement [Associated Press]

Declassification in Reverse

The National Security Archive issued a report today on a secret document reclassification program the US intelligence community has been carrying out over the last seven years. According to the report, "some 9,500 formerly declassified and publicly-available documents totaling more than 55,500 pages have been withdrawn from the open shelves at College Park and reclassified because, according to the U.S. government agencies, they had been improperly and/or inadvertently released."

No one wants government documents which contain up-to-date technical information about weapons programs to fall into the wrong hands, but it is hard to imagine how some of these historical documents - many of which are from the 1940's and 1950's - could possibly aid terrorists, or otherwise endanger national security. Pictured below is an excerpt of one of the examples given by the National Security Archive, "Memorandum, Hillenkoetter to Executive Secretary, NSC, Atomic Energy Program of the USSR, April 20, 1949." In the memo, a CIA officer recommends procedures for carrying out intelligence-gathering operations on the Soviet Union's atomic weapons programs.



Report: "Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program" [National Security Archive]

Thank God for the Death of Neoconservatism

The same week the war in Iraq began, arch neocon Richard Perle wrote an op-ed piece for the Guardian titled "Thank God for the death of the UN," which does a better job of explaining why we really invaded Iraq than the Bush administration ever has. One week later, Perle resigned from his post as chairman of the Defense Policy Board because of a conflict of interest controversy involving his representation of the firm Global Crossing.

Three years later, the situation in Iraq represents everything that is wrong with the neocons' Pollyannish approach to foreign policy. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama's excellent essay in the New York Times, "After Neoconservatism," gives a brief history of the movement, pronounces it dead, and yearns for a replacement that is just as hopeful, but not nearly as naive.

DoD Staffer's Notes from 9/11 Obtained Under FOIA

On July 23, 2005, I submitted an electronic Freedom
of Information Act request to the Department of Defense
seeking DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes from
meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on
the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Cambone's notes
were cited heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report's
reconstruction of the day's events. On February 10,
2006, I received a response from the DoD which
includes partially-redacted copies of Cambone's notes.
The documents can be viewed as a photo set on Flickr.

The released notes document Donald Rumsfeld's 2:40
PM instructions to General Myers to find the "[b]est
info fast . . . judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time - not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]" (as discussed on p. 334-335 of the 9/11 Commission Report and in Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack).

In addition, the documents confirm the contents of CBS News' Sept. 4, 2002 report "Plans For Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted Rumsfeld's notes as stating: "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not." These lines were not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report or Woodward's Plan of Attack, and to my knowledge, have not been independently confirmed by any other source. After the Rathergate fiasco, I wondered if CBS had been fooled into publishing a story that, from a publicity perspective, seemed too good to be true.

Finally, these documents unveil a previously undisclosed part of the 2:40 PM discussion. Several lines below the "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at same time" line, Cambone's notes from the conversation read: "Hard to get a good case."

In addition to being available as a photo set on Flickr, you can download the documents in PDF format below. BitTorrent users can also download a 6.9 MB zip file containing PDFs of all the documents. [Torrent / Prodigem torrent details page]

Notes from 12:05 PM meeting [PDF]
Notes from 12:05 PM meeting (negative) [PDF]
Notes from 2:40 PM meeting [PDF]
Notes from 2:40 PM meeting (negative) [PDF]
Notes from 9:53 PM meeting [PDF]
Notes from 9:53 PM meeting (negative) [PDF]
DoD's FOIA release letter [PDF]
Raw scan of page 3 of notes [PDF]
Raw scan of page 5 of notes [PDF]
Raw scan of page 6 of notes [PDF]
Raw scan of page 9 of notes [PDF]

(Edited on 2/19/06 to include BitTorrent link, and on 2/23/06 to correct a typo and add another link to the Flickr photo set. Subsequent related posts: The Guardian Covers Cambone's 9/11 Notes; "Hard to get a good case": Early Attempts to Link 9/11 and Iraq)

Under renovation

As part of the effort to bring American students up to par with the rest of the world in the technology sector, outragedmoderates.org is currently under renovation. I apologize for the site's current appearance. Please check back at the end of the week for the new and improved version of the site, built with Google's Blogger software - which will coincide with the release of an interesting new Freedom of Information Act document.

In the meantime, much of outragedmoderates.org 1.0 is still online, and can be accessed via the sidebar on the Government Document Library page.

Bittorrent files of government documents.

- Thad

CBS Report on Rumsfeld's 9/11 Notes Under Scrutiny

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: Originally posted on March 13, 2005. On February 10, 2006, outragedmoderates.org obtained DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes under the Freedom of Information Act, which confirm the contents of the CBS report discussed in this post. For more information, see the post "DoD staffer's notes from 9/11 obtained under FOIA.")

On September 4, 2002, CBSNEWS.com ran a bombshell of a story titled "Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11." The article stated that "barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq -- even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." The article cited "notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11."

CBSNEWS.com, "Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11," 9/4/02:

. . . at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." - meaning Saddam Hussein - "at same time. Not only UBL" - the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden . . . "Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

To those of us who were questioning the Bush administration's push to invade Iraq, this article was nothing short of mind-blowing. The last part of the notes was the kicker. What did Rumsfeld mean when he asked his aides to "[s]weep it all up," looking for "[t]hings related and not," unless he was encouraging them to cherry-pick for anything that could be used to link the attacks to Iraq? In ten words, Donald Rumsfeld had confirmed our very worst fears about the Bush administration's reckless approach to Iraq. Looking at the article, it is obvious that CBS knew that the last few sentences were the key part of the quotation. Printed in bold letters, under a menacing photo of Rumsfeld, were the lines: "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Since the article was published in September 2002, thousands of websites and blogs have linked to it. On this blog, I contrasted Rumsfeld's "related and not" quote with Robert E. Lee's observation that "[i]t is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." When I read Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, I was intrigued to learn that Colin Powell had also been drawn to Lee's quotation during the lead-up to Iraq.

But while Robert E. Lee's quotation surfaced in Plan of Attack, Rumsfeld's "related and not" quotation is nowhere to be seen. Woodward's account of 9/11 discusses Rumsfeld's notes from that afternoon, but there is no mention of the "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not" quotation that was reported in CBS's article.

Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 24-25:

At 2:40 P.M. that day, with dust and smoke filling the operations center as he was trying to figure out what happened, Rumsfeld raised with his staff the possibility of going after Iraq as a response to the terrorist attacks, according to an aide's notes. Saddam Hussein is S.H. in these notes, and UBL is Usama Bin Laden. The notes show that Rumsfeld had mused about whether to "hit S.H. @ same time - not only UBL" and asked the Pentagon lawyer to talk to Paul Wolfowitz about the Iraq "connection with UBL." The next day in the inner circle of Bush's war cabinet, Rumsfeld asked if the terrorist attacks did not present an "opportunity" to launch against Iraq.

On July 22, 2004, the 9-11 Commission released its full report on the attacks. Chapter 10 ("Wartime") discusses Rumsfeld's 9/11 notes, but there is no mention of the "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not" quotation. The section discussing Rumsfeld's activities on 9/11/01, excerpted below, gives an account that is almost identical to Woodward's. The chapter's footnotes cite notes taken on September 11 by Department of Defense staffers Victoria Clarke and Stephen Cambone.

The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 334-335:

On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible. The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. He thought the U.S. response should consider a wide range of options and possibilities. The secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time--not only Bin Ladin. Secretary Rumsfeld later explained that at the time, he had been considering either one of them, or perhaps someone else, as the responsible party.

Before CBS's National Guard memo controversy, I had not noticed the discrepancy between the network's coverage of Rumsfeld's 9/11 notes and the accounts given in The 9/11 Commission Report and Plan of Attack. But the carelessness CBS demonstrated in regards to the forged National Guard memos forced me to take another hard look at the article.

After spending hours researching this online, and skimming through dozens of books at bookstores, I cannot find a single media source or book that independently reports the "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not" quotation. Every single blog post, article, and book I have found that does mention this quotation refers back to the CBS article from September 4, 2002 as the source.

Some of the most significant books on this topic, like Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, and John Dean's Worse Than Watergate, do not discuss the contents of the notes. Among the significant books that cite the CBS article are Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, James Bamford's A Pretext for War, and The War We Could Not Stop, a collection of articles by reporters at the UK newspapers the Guardian and the Observer.

It may not mean anything that there is a discrepancy between CBS's report on Rumsfeld's 9/11 notes, and the accounts given in The 9/11 Commission Report and Plan of Attack, two of the most authoritative accounts of the hours and days following the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission Members and Bob Woodward might have merely left the quotation out of their respective accounts of Rumsfeld's notes, for a variety of political or editorial reasons.

However, the 9/11 Commission made a point of taking on many of the issues that had become most controversial during the 2 ½ years between the attacks and the book's release, such as the Saudi flights after 9/11. It seems unlikely that the 9/11 Commission would have discussed some of the contents of Rumsfeld's 9/11 notes, but then left out the most controversial part of them. And if the CBS version of Rumfeld's notes is real, it is hard to imagine Bob Woodward leaving it out of Plan of Attack, his controversial 467-page book dedicated to how the Bush administration came to its decision to invade Iraq.

Even if CBS's report is incorrect, the discrepancy does not change my view on the larger issue. Regardless of whether Rumsfeld instructed his aides to "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not," it is well-documented that the Bush administration began searching for a link between 9/11 and Iraq shortly after the attacks happened. Also, this kind of discrepancy does not convince me that there is a systemic liberal bias in the media - in fact, the very reason this article was so influential was that it stood out as a breath of fresh air in the oppressive media climate of 2002, when Americans who questioned the Bush administration's arguments for invading Iraq were marginalized.

But if blogs are really going to serve as a check on the power of the media, it is important that bloggers scrutinize everything, and not just reports that "hurt" one side or the other. When a major media outlet quotes the Secretary of Defense in the context of a highly controversial military decision, "mostly true" just isn't good enough. And personally, I am much more disturbed by the thought of a network running a questionable story that preys on my own beliefs and biases, than one that preys on someone else's beliefs and biases.

If anyone else has more information about Rumsfeld's 9/11 notes, please email me, or post it at Blogcritics.org, where this article is cross-posted.

(IMPORTANT UPDATE: Originally posted on March 13, 2005. On February 10, 2006, outragedmoderates.org obtained DoD staffer Stephen Cambone's notes under the Freedom of Information Act, which confirm the contents of the CBS report discussed in this post. For more information, see the post "DoD staffer's notes from 9/11 obtained under FOIA.")