By: E&P Staff A new book by Ron Suskind went on sale today but Politico.com got a scoop late yesterday via the usual modern route: Finding a copy in a bookstore a bit ahead of schedule. Armed with the text, Politico's Mike Allen was able to reveal that the book "claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
Suskind writes in ?The Way of the World? that the alleged forgery ? denied by the White House ? "was designed to portray a false link between Hussein?s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.
The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official 'that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ? intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.'"
In fact, such a letter was produced and received media play in late 2003, including at the London Telepgraph and on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News program, among other outlets.
The full scoop is at www.politico.com.
Suskind on the Today Show today called the forgery an "Impeachable offense" and added that President Bush's manipulating evidence in the march to war amounted to a crime worse than Watergate.
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