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Pentagon report finds no evidence
of Saddam attempt to assassinate Bush
Nick Juliano
Raw
Story
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
In President Bush's view, former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein was many things -- a developer of weapons of mass
destruction, an ally of al Qaeda and "a guy that tried to
kill my dad."
Recent intelligence reports have already shot down those first
two notions. No WMD stockpiles were found in Iraq after the US
invasion, and a just-released Pentagon assessment failed to find
any "smoking gun" link between Saddam and the terror
group that plotted the 9/11 attacks.
Now skepticism is newly enveloping allegations of an Iraqi plot
to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush during a trip
to Kuwait in 1993. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports that the
same Pentagon report that has essentially disproved an Iraq-al
Qaeda link also calls into question the 1993 plot that spurred
former President Bill Clinton to launch a Tomahawk cruise-missle
strike against Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). Isikoff
writes:
The review, conducted for the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command,
combed through 600,000 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents
seized after the fall of Baghdad, as well as thousands of hours
of audio- and videotapes of Saddam's conversations with his
ministers and top aides. The study found that the IIS kept remarkably
detailed records of virtually every operation it planned, including
plots to assassinate Iraqi exiles and to supply explosives and
booby-trapped suitcases to Iraqi embassies. But the Pentagon
researchers found no documents that referred to a plan to kill
Bush. The absence was conspicuous because researchers, aware
of its potential significance, were looking for such evidence.
"It was surprising," said one source familiar with
the preparation of the report (who under Pentagon ground rules
was not permitted to speak on the record). Given how much the
Iraqis did document, "you would have thought there would
have been some veiled reference to something about [the plot]."
(Article continues below)
Isikoff notes that the absence of evidence does not prove the
Iraqis weren't planning to assassinate the former question (just
as Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said about
Iraq WMD never found, that "the absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence"), but his latest report adds to questions
that have been raised about the alleged plot since the months
before and after the missile strike it inspired.
On May 27, 1993, the Boston Globe obtained a CIA report that
questioned Kuwait's claims of the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush
(via Nexis):
A classified US intelligence analysis has concluded that Kuwait
may have "cooked the books" on an alleged plot to
assassinate former President Bush while he was in Kuwait last
month. [...] At least one administration official has expressed
the fear that President Clinton, under heavy criticism for his
indecision over issues like Bosnia, may be tempted to hit at
Iraq to prove his willingness to undertake resolute action.
The report notes that some of the evidence definitely points
to Iraqi involvement. The explosive devices captured by the
Kuwaitis, for example, match those used by Iraqi intelligence
in other terrorist operations. But the report says it was unable
to corroborate the Kuwaiti assertion that the plot was aimed
at Bush.
In November 1993, the New Yorker's tenacious investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh reported, "[M]y own investigations have uncovered
circumstantial evidence, at least as compelling as the [Clinton]
Administration's, that suggests that the American government's
case against Iraq—as it has been outlined in public, anyway—is
seriously flawed."
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