Links between Hussien & Al-Queda

[Guest Cerebus]

This Editorial by William Safire was in the NYTimes today (reproduced below if you don't feel like registering) and I found it quite the eye-opener. Thoughts?

 

Missing Links Found

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

 

Published: November 24, 2003

 

WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.

 

On weeklystandard.com, you can find chunks of a 16-page letter by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, responding to a Senate Intelligence Committee request for evidence of Saddam-bin Laden collaboration. Fifty specific instances from C.I.A., N.S.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon files are described, many from "sensitive reporting" never made public.

 

The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of "raw reports or products" of U.S. intelligence agencies on "the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," cautioning that it "drew no conclusions." But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of "custodial interviews" of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial.

 

Remember how anti-liberation politicians and journalists pooh-poohed Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the U.N. about the presence in Iraq of a Qaeda associate, identified in this space as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Powell's assertion had this "sensitive reporting" basis: "As of Oct. 2002 al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city."

 

Deniers derogate as "cherry picking" Feith's intelligence summary available to senators: "The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, al Ani, on several occasions. During one of those meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS [iraq Intelligence Service] finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office."

 

If true, that would implicate Saddam's regime in the murder of 3,000 Americans. Though the C.I.A. can confirm two Atta trips to Prague, in 1994 and 2000, it cannot confirm the two other visits the Czechs reported, including one on April 9, 2001, with Saddam's top European agent, al-Ani, then vice consul in Prague. C.I.A. chief George Tenet testified that the meeting reported by the Czech service was "possible," but the F.B.I. floated hints that car rental records showed Atta to be traveling between Virginia and Florida that week.

 

Enter the writer Edward Jay Epstein in the liberal online journal Slate: "All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license." You cannot rent a car without a driver's license.

 

Epstein went to Prague this month to interview Czech officials who want to cooperate with the U.S. to get to the bottom of the Atta-Iraqi story but have been stiffed by the F.B.I., whose bureaucracy is sensitive to charges of failed surveillance. Read his detailed Slate report and subsequent commentary on edwardjayepstein.com.

 

Since July, al-Ani has been in U.S. Department of Justice custody and I wonder how effectively he is being interrogated. Have we learned the whereabouts of his Prague and Baghdad aides and secretaries, and taken their testimony? Have we asked M.I.5 to let us speak to Jabir Salim, his Prague station-chief predecessor, who defected to Britain and may know which employees and which banks could transfer $100,000 to an account accessible to Atta?

 

Did al-Ani order any payment to "the student from Hamburg" or his co-conspirators, as Czech intelligence believes, and did the paymaster carry out the order? To what superior in Baghdad did al-Ani report, and who worked most closely with him, and are they in custody and do their stories jibe? What have we offered al-Ani, in protection or immunity or plea bargain, to turn state's evidence?

 

F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is duty-bound to examine the full transcript of the interrogation to see how seriously this is being pursued; same with Senate Intelligence. I'd also assign new agents to follow up leads in Prague.

 

Intrepid journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case.

[NoCalMike 0]

Wasn't the US linked to both though, supplying money and weapons to both of these folks?

[1234-5678 0]

Wasn't the US linked to both though, supplying money and weapons to both of these folks?

Yeah. Bin Laden in the late 70s to fight the Russians, and Hussein in the early 80s to fight Iran.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Iraqi Agent Denies He Met 9/11 Hijacker in Prague Before Attacks on the U.S.

By JAMES RISEN

 

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told American interrogators the meeting never happened, according to United States officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter.

 

Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the United States in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations.

 

American officials caution that Mr. Ani may have been lying to American interrogators, but the only other person reported to have attended the meeting was Mr. Atta, who died in the crash of his hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

 

Reports that an Iraqi spy had met with Mr. Atta in Prague first circulated soon after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but they have been in dispute ever since.

 

Czech government officials initially confirmed the reports, even as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they could not corroborate them. Conservatives both inside and out of the Bush administration, arguing for war with Iraq, pointed to the reports as evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization that planned the Sept. 11 attacks.

 

During the period between the Sept. 11 attacks and the war, the reports of the Prague meeting came under intense scrutiny from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Pentagon and the White House.

 

Possible contacts between Mr. Atta and Mr. Ani seemed to offer the clearest potential connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda at a time when the Bush administration was arguing that invading Iraq was part of its campaign against terrorism.

 

But the C.I.A. and F.B.I. eventually concluded that the meeting probably did not take place, and that there was no hard evidence that Mr. Hussein's government was involved in the Sept. 11 plot.

 

That put the intelligence agencies at odds with hard-liners at the Pentagon and the White House, who came to believe that C.I.A. analysts had ignored evidence that proved links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Eventually, the Prague meeting became a central element in a battle between the C.I.A. and the administration's hawks over prewar intelligence.

 

Since American forces toppled the Hussein government and the United States gained access to captured Iraqi officials and Iraqi files, the C.I.A. has not yet uncovered evidence that has altered its prewar assessment concerning the connections between Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, officials said.

 

American intelligence officials say they believe there were contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the 1990's, but there is no proof that they ever conducted joint operations.

 

Senior operatives of Al Qaeda who have been captured by the United States since Sept. 11 have also denied any alliance between the organization and Mr. Hussein.

 

Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-ranking Qaeda leaders in American custody, told the C.I.A. that Mr. bin Laden rejected the idea of working with Mr. Hussein, a secular leader whom Mr. bin Laden considered corrupt and irredeemable, according to a September 2002 classified intelligence report obtained by The New York Times.

 

Mr. Zubaydah said that some Qaeda operatives wanted the organization to try to take advantage of Mr. Hussein's hatred for the United States in order to obtain military material or other support from Iraq. But Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were strongly opposed to working with Iraq, according to the report of Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing, which was obtained from Bush administration officials.

 

Al Qaeda's leadership "viewed the Iraqis, particularly the military and security services, as corrupt, irreligious and hypocritical in that they succumb to Western vices while concurrently remaining at war with the United States," the report says, summarizing Mr. Zubaydah's statements. "The Iraqis were not viewed as true jihadists, and there was doubt amongst the senior Al Qaeda leadership on the depth of Saddam's commitment to destroy Israel and further the cause of cleansing the Holy Land of infidel influences or presence."

 

The debriefing report contains significant caveats, warning that Mr. Zubaydah, who was captured in March 2002, might be seeking to mislead the United States.

 

Separately, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations until his capture on March 1, 2003, in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that Al Qaeda never agreed to work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.

 

But even as the C.I.A. has played down the connection, the report of a Prague meeting has continued to resonate among administration conservatives. As recently as September, two months after Mr. Ani was captured, Vice President Dick Cheney referred to the Prague meeting during an appearance on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."

 

Asked about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Mr. Cheney replied: "With respect to 9/11, of course, we've had the story that's been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know."

 

The story first emerged in October 2001, when the Czech interior minister said publicly that there was evidence that Mr. Atta had met with Mr. Ani in April 2001. At the time, Mr. Ani was serving as an Iraqi intelligence officer under diplomatic cover at the Iraqi Embassy in Prague.

 

Later, many Czech government officials became much more skeptical that the meeting ever took place, particularly after it became clear that the initial intelligence report from the Czech domestic intelligence agency concerning the meeting had come from a single informant in the local Arab community.

 

The information was treated skeptically by Czech intelligence experts because it had been provided only after the Sept. 11 attacks, after Mr. Atta's picture had been broadcast on television and published in newspapers around the world, and after the Czech press reported that records showed that Mr. Atta had once traveled to Prague.

 

Czech officials have said that border police records showed that Mr. Atta, who was then living in Hamburg, Germany, did come to Prague in June 2000, after obtaining a visa in late May. Shortly after arriving in Prague on that occasion, Mr. Atta flew to Newark.

 

American records now indicate that Mr. Atta was in Virginia Beach, Va., in early April 2001, when he was supposedly in Prague to meet Mr. Ani.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/13/internat...ope/13INQU.html

[Guest Cerebus]

And we all believe him don't we folks?