Ignoring the connection: Why?
Andrew McCarthy is the former chief assistant United States Attorney who successfully prosecuted the blind sheik and eleven other defendants for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Before we turn the page on the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, in addition to Stephen Hayes's The Connection, please consider McCarthy's "Iraq & al Qaeda" on NRO this morning.
McCarthy quotes the 9/11 Commission report paragraph ("Statement No. 15") that has created this morning's banner headlines:
Bin Laden also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime. Bin Laden had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Laden to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.McCarthy comments:
Just taken on its own terms, this paragraph is both internally inconsistent and ambiguously worded. First, it cannot be true both that the Sudanese arranged contacts between Iraq and bin Laden and that no "ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq." If the first proposition is so, then the "[t]wo senior Bin Laden associates" who are the sources of the second are either lying or misinformed.McCarthy also quotes from count 4 of the government's 1998 indictment of bin Laden (also noted by Hayes in his book):In light of the number of elementary things the commission staff tells us its investigation has been unable to clarify (for example, in the very next sentence after the Iraq paragraph, the staff explains that the question whether al Qaeda had any connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the 1995 plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky "remains a matter of substantial uncertainty"), it is fair to conclude that these two senior bin Laden associates may not be the most cooperative, reliable fellows in town regarding what bin Laden was actually up to. Moreover, we know from press reports and the administration's own statements about the many al Qaeda operatives it has captured since 9/11 that the government is talking to more than just two of bin Laden's top operatives. That begs the questions: Have we really only asked two of them about Iraq? If not, what did the other detainees say?
Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezballah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.McCarthy notes that the count 4 allegation is based primarily on accomplice testimony from the embassy bombing trial and has not been retracted. McCarthy quotes from the public testimony of CIA Director George Tenet that Hayes has identified in his compilation of the evidence making out the existence of a "connection." McCarthy asks:
Is the commission staff saying that the CIA director has provided faulty information to Congress? That doesn't appear to be what it is saying at all. This is clear — if anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" — from the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation sentence, which is worth parsing since it is already being gleefully misreported: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." (Italics mine.) That is, the staff is not saying al Qaeda and Iraq did cooperate — far from it. The staff seems to be saying: "they appear to have cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific terrorist attack, such as 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing, or the embassy bombings."McCarthy then proceeds to comment on the 9/11 Commission report's treatment of Mohammad Atta's possible May 2001 trip to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent named Ahmed al-Ani. We know that Atta was in Prague in late May and early June 2000 under suspicious circumstances. McCarthy wonders why the report ignores Atta's year 2000 trips to Prague:
According to the 9/11 Commission staff report, bin Laden originally pressed the operational supervisor of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), "that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000," even though bin Laden "recognized that Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training[.]" Well I'll be darned: mid-2000 is exactly when Atta made his two frenetic trips to Prague immediately before heading to the United States to begin that flight training.An eyewitness and other evidence suggest that Atta met with al-Ani in May 2001; the report concludes otherwise based on the record of Atta's cell phone use in Florida on the relevant days. Atta's cell phone, however, could well have been used by his terrorist roommate.
Today's news also highlights the report finding that bin Laden originally wanted the 9/11 attacks to occur in mid-May, then in June or July. McCarthy concludes:
Well, what do you know: all those dates are only weeks after Atta may have had some reason to drop everything and secretly run to Prague for a meeting with al-Ani.McCarthy's column powerfully exposes the 9/11 Commission report that is in the news today as the tendentious brief of an advocate manipulating evidence to make a point rather than the considered judgment of an investigative body vested with profound national responsibility to discover the truth. It is far past time that someone ask the inevitable question: Why?Or maybe it's just a coincidence.
