Iraq and al Qaeda

[adios]

Iraq and al Qaeda

A couple of excerpts:

• About a month after September 11, reports surfaced that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi embassy official and intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. Al-Ani was a later expelled from the Czech Republic, in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Iraq. Despite repeated attempts to discredit the report of a meeting between the two, Czech officials at the cabinet level have stuck by the story. Al-Ani has been captured in Iraq, and the public deserves to know what he's telling U.S. officials about that meeting.

• Also in October 2001, two defectors alleged that a 707 fuselage at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, was being used to train terrorists in the art of hijacking with simple weapons such as knives. Though no link to al Qaeda was alleged, some of the trainees were said to be non-Iraqi Arabs. The fuselage was clearly visible in satellite photos, and has since been found.

• Press reports, which had begun in 1998, resurfaced that former Iraqi intelligence chief and then-ambassador to Turkey Faruk Hijazi had met with bin Laden and associates on multiple occasions. Hijazi is in U.S. custody too, and has reportedly confirmed some of the alleged contacts.

[brad]

well the first one

' About a month after September 11, reports surfaced that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi embassy official and intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. Al-Ani was a later expelled from the Czech Republic, in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Europe/Radio Free Iraq. Despite repeated attempts to discredit the report of a meeting between the two, Czech officials at the cabinet level have stuck by the story. Al-Ani has been captured in Iraq, and the public deserves to know what he's telling U.S. officials about that meeting.

'

have been 100% disproved and even when cheney reiterated it this sunday or maybe last sunday everybody said what a liar he knows it is untrue, etc.

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
well the first one

'have been 100% disproved and even when cheney reiterated it this sunday or maybe last sunday everybody said what a liar he knows it is untrue, etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

Me again Brad, just where, when and how was this disproved?

[brad]

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com has a lot of stuff. sure this is one story. you may say how can u believe one story. all i can say is that i read a lot of stories like this and they all agree on this kind of stuff. (eg, cheney lied about atta in czech repub. story)

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgame...=3&pid=949

...
Let's start with Dick Cheney. He appeared on Meet The Press and was asked by host Tim Russert if there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. He replied, "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." This was a deceptive answer. Shortly after 9/11, Czech intelligence officials did say they had a report from a source--a single source--that Atta had met with this Iraqi intelligence official in April 2001. Subsequent media reports in the United States noted that the source was an Arab student who was not considered particularly reliable. The FBI investigated and found nothing to substantiate the report of the meeting. In fact, the FBI concluded that Atta was most likely in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting, and the CIA questioned the existence of this meeting. (Even if there had been a meeting, one could not tell what it meant unless it was known what was said--and no one, not even Cheney, has claimed to know what might have transpired.)

Moreover, on October 21, 2002, The New York Times reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of the meeting. And it seemed that Atta had gone to Prague in June 2000, not April 2001. "Now," the paper noted, "some Czech and German officials say that their best explanation of why Mr. Atta came to Prague was to get a cheap airfare to the United States."

For some reason, Cheney did not share with the Meet the Press audience the information about Havel's denial. Nor did he note that U.S. forces had nabbed this Iraqi intelligence official in July and that there has been no word--no leaks--about him confirming the supposed meeting. All in all, the case for the meeting is rather flimsy. But Cheney, as he did a year ago on the same show, pointed to this alleged meeting as a reason to suspect Hussein was in on the 9/11 attacks--which, if true, would justify the U.S. strike against Iraq. Waving the Atta-in-Prague story was an act of mendacious information manipulation, and Russert did not challenge Cheney on it.

[brad]

http://www.democracynow.org/article..../09/16/1559208

background
--------

http://www.democracynow.org/article....251&tid=51

about debunked atta story

[brad]

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101~6267~1639188,00.html

short article on atta lie

[Chris Alger]

Interesting one-two strategy: Bush his subordinates take the "high road" of admitting there's no link, while protected Cheney and the right-wing press promote the big lie. This way, smart people can't accuse Bush and Co. of outright lying while right-wingers get their conpsiracy fix, imagining that the "liberal media" accounts for their inability to find this stuff outside the partisan press.

Here's another way of summarizing the same "information":

Despite <ul type="square">(1) years of continuous electronic surveillance and spying, vastly intensified over the last two years;

(2) the capture and interogation of thousands of al Qaeda, Taliban and Iraqi prisoners, including some of their most senior operatives;

(3) the capture and review of hundreds of thousands of documents, computer disks and cell phones, including vast amounts of the diplomatic and intelligence archives of Iraq and the Taliban; and

(4) access to antiterrorist intelligence from friendly governments throughout the Middle East (Israel, Pakistan, Turkey);[/list]no government official, agency, investigator, or reporter can point to any evidence proving or even suggesting that Iraq or Saddam Hussein took any action or played any part in the planning or exeution of any other act of terrorism by al Qaeda.

Prague meeting: no evidence other than a report from what the head of Czech intelligence described as an "unreliable" source. WSJ doesn't mention that neither the FBI, the CIA nor Czech intelligence officials believe the meeting happened. Notice the conpiracy-speak: "Despite repeated attempts to discredit the report of a meeting between the two...." Who is making such "repeated attempts" to "discredit" ostensibly worthy evidence, and how did they come to control the White House?

Also: "Al-Ani has been captured in Iraq, and the public deserves to know what he's telling U.S. officials about that meeting" (note the presumption of existence). The WSJ again suggests something sinister is afoot. After all, the public, indeed Bush, Rummy the CIA and FBI, aren't being told to juicy tidbits alluded to. Why not just ask Newsweek: "The Iraqi who allegedly met Atta, Ahmed al Ani, is now in U.S. custody and denies the meeting occurred...."

Salman Pak: based on inherently suspect defector reports contradicted by other sources claiming that the facility was used for antiterrorism training. More to the point, WSJ admits "no link to al Qaeda was [even] alleged...."

[Iraqi intelligence chief] Hijazi contacts: WSJ doesn't disclose the alleged meetings took place years before 9/11. If the WSJ knows enough to say that Hijazi has "confirmed some of the alleged contacts," why can't they say that something relevant to Iraqi assistance to al Qaeda was discussed?

Abdul Yassin: WSJ doesn't disclose that "the Iraqis claimed that Yasin was in prison from 1994 until shortly before the war. 'He was being clothed and fed by them so long as he wore stripes,' joked one U.S. investigator." Newsweek (which also acknowledges anonymous reports that Saddam gave him shelter and money).

[MMMMMM]

CA: "no government official, agency, investigator, or reporter can point to any evidence proving or even suggesting that Iraq or Saddam Hussein took any action or played any part in the planning or exeution of any other act of terrorism by al Qaeda."

LOL, so what if they didn't contribute directly to any act of terrorism by al-Qaeda; if they supported al-Qaeda recently, that's bad enough.

[Chris Alger]

Aside from the fact that there isn't any clear evidence of this either, if it's "bad enough" then why do you suppose the distinction wasn't made by the WSJ? Answer: because the WSJ is trying to create a beachhead for the acceptable outer fringe of respectable opinion, making it harder for people to grasp that the war was waged by knaves who lied.

[MMMMMM]

Interesting conclusion Chris but it's all Clinton's fault anyway as his administration should have been the one to have gone into Afghanistan and Iraq.