NEW YORK -- When will the press stop circulating dubious or fabricated claims -- whether from Bush administration officials or intelligence abroad? The latest chapter unfolded this week with wide publicity -- capped by a favorable mention in a William Safire column in The New York Times on Monday and the usual hosannas on Fox News -- concerning a supposed document that linked 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).
This sort of "evidence," which surfaces periodically, is significant, as polls have always shown that one of the major reasons the public supported the invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) was belief that Saddam helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Even after more than two years have passed -- and no hard evidence of that uncovered -- a poll earlier this week showed that slightly more than half of all Americans still believe that to be true, suggesting that perhaps the press has not really done its job in debunking this belief.
Now appears a document linking Atta to Hussein, which comes amid reports that the U.S. chief weapons inspector is about to call it quits, having failed to uncover any weapons of mass destruction.
There's only one problem: Just like every other bit of paper linking Saddam to 9/11 (some of them also touted by Safire), the latest document appears to be bogus. Yet many in the press keep taking them seriously.
According to U.S. law enforcement officials and FBI (news - web sites) documents, the latest "smoking gun" linking Saddam to 9/11-- purporting to show that Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001-- is probably a fabrication, Newsweek reported this week. In fact, the new document, supposedly written by the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service, is contradicted by U.S. law-enforcement records showing that Atta was staying at cheap motels and apartments in the United States when the trip would have taken place.
The document was hailed by the Sunday Telegraph of London earlier this week in a front-page story written by Con Coughlin, a Telegraph correspondent and the author of the book Saddam: The Secret Life.
But U.S. officials and a leading Iraqi document expert told Newsweek that the document is most likely a forgery -- "part of a thriving new trade in dubious Iraqi documents that has cropped up in the wake of the collapse of Saddam's regime."
Senior U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials said "the claims of an Atta trip to Iraq in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks were highly implausible -- and contradicted by a wealth of information that has been collected about Atta's movements during the period he was plotting the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites)."
Contacted by Newsweek, the Sunday Telegraph's Coughlin acknowledged that "he could not prove the authenticity of the document. He said that while he got the memo about Mohammed Atta and Baghdad from a 'senior' member of the Iraqi Governing Council who insisted it was 'genuine,' he and his newspaper had 'no way of verifying it. It's our job as journalists to air these things and see what happens,' he said."
-Greg Mitchell is editor of E&P.