WASHINGTON — The Bush administration and former top CIA officials denounced a new book’s assertion that the White House ordered the forgery of Iraqi documents to suggest a link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the lead hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. The claim was made by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, whose book ‘The Way of the World’ also contends that the White House obtained compelling evidence in early 2003 that Iraq possessed no significant stocks of nuclear or biological weapons but decided to invade anyway. Suskind, who has written two previous investigative books that contained criticism of Bush administration policies, described the alleged forgery as one of the great lies in modern American political history, likening it to Watergate. White House condemnations of the book were equally dramatic, with officials blasting it as ‘gutter journalism.’ In separate statements, several former and current CIA officials disputed portions of the account, including two named by Suskind as key sources. The book’s most contentious allegations involve Tahir Jalil Habbush, Hussein’s intelligence chief before the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003. As the deadline for war neared, U.S. and British officials met with Habbush and confronted him […]