The back and forth over the Able Danger disclosures has again drawn attention to the meeting in April, 2004 which Czech intelligence says took place between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. The 9/11 Commission rejects that Czech eyewitness testimony, and instead relies largely on the testimony of two terrorists who were planners and ringleaders of the 9/11 attacks, who deny that the meeting took place. This old story gets another look from Ed Morrissey:
Czech intelligence privately told the United States that it had evidence that al-Ani met with Mohammed Atta on April 9, 2001. Later, the Czechs went public with the information--and to this day, the Czechs insistently stand behind this intelligence. Part of the reason for this insistence is not just a belief in their source, but also a corroborating entry in al-Ani's datebook, which the Czechs apparently discovered during a surreptitious search of the Iraqi embassy after Saddam's fall in April 2003. The datebook contained an entry for an April 2001 meeting with a "Hamburg student," the same description used by Atta himself when applying for his visa. (It is perhaps worth noting that Epstein is the only person to have reported on the existence of this daybook.)However, the 9/11 Commission disregarded the Czech intelligence and declared that Atta had never gone to Prague in April 2001. How did the Commission reach this conclusion? Their report details the factors that went into this rejection on pages 228-9:
* Atta's cell phone was used in the U.S. on April 6, 9, 10, and 11
* No U.S. records of Atta traveling under his own name
* No pictures of anyone who looked like Atta in the Czech Republic on those dates
* Testimony from two al Qaeda sources . . . Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh
We have been told repeatedly that the 9/11 Commission Report debunks the Prague trip, but the report says only that it "cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that Atta was in Prague on April 9, 2001. He could have used an alias to travel and a passport under that alias, but this would be an exception to his practice of using his true name while traveling (as he did in January and would in July when he took his next overseas trip). The FBI and CIA have uncovered no evidence that Atta held any fraudulent passports."
The Commission's source for this? Ramzi Binalshibh.
Why did the Commission put so much emphasis on the testimony of two terrorists while dismissing the testimony of two senior American officers in determining the timeline for Mohammed Atta and the Hamburg cell?
Morrissey links to the Edward Jay Epstein account of the Prague meeting, and Jim Geraghty gives an updated summary of "what we know" at the moment about the Able Danger testimony.
The obvious implication of accepting the historical fact of Atta's Prague meeting would be that the mantra of the Iraq campaign opponents...
"Saddam's Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks"
...is blown to smithereens.
Several yet unanswered questions come to mind. For starters...
Was the 9/11 Commission so politicized that they ignored information, ranging from the Czech intelligence reports to the Able Danger disclosures, that conflicted with their preferred version of events, which functioned to shield Jamie Gorelick, the CIA establishment, and the Clinton administration from the severe criticism that would otherwise have been showered on them?
How do those same Iraq war opponents respond to the publication in March, 2001 (cited by Morrissey) by a Parisian Arabic newspaper, of a report on the arrest of two Iraqi spies in Germany:
Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.
Unbelievably the Commission didn't consider this information pertinent to their report. Now the folks with careers at risk in this matter seem to be less interested in truth-seeking than they are in questioning the credibility of the U.S. military intelligence officials who have come forward to testify on Able Danger's findings, and the disposition of those findings.
Because acknowledging a bonafide connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bombings would be a heaping plate of crow for the opponents of Bush's Iraq policies to choke down, and a revelation that the 9/11 Commission ignored important testimony in part to protect key Clinton administration officials would be a huge story, and one that could wreak long-term damage on the Democratic Party. Avoiding that disclosure might have been worth risking getting caught stealing and destroying documents from the National Archives just before the 9/11 Commission testimony began.
I'm glad people like Morrissey, Geraghty, Malkin, and others are all over the case.
UPDATE 8/24: An editorial at Investors.com summarizes events and asks questions:
...we can't believe that amid all the hedging and nondenial denials there isn't a truth to be had. The claims are too important to let it go at this.If the 9-11 commission dropped the ball, we should know about it. And if it was told of this but didn't include it in its monumental report, what are they hiding?
And if the Clinton administration dropped the ball — failing to move against al-Qaida operatives after repeated attacks on the U.S. in the 1990s — shouldn't we know that, too?
UPDATE 8/24: Ed Morrissey's follow-up post to the Daily Standard article
Posted by dan at August 24, 2005 12:53 AM