Did the 9/11 Commission Report leave out mention of Iraqi agents arrested in Germany that could link Mohammed Atta's Hamburg cell of al Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein's regime?

Captain Ed had made this speculation earlier here, not claiming that such a link existed but only that this needs further investigation.

I replied in this earlier post that maybe this should be looked into, but that the speculation that such ties could exist were unwarrented by the facts.

He in turn put up another post on the subject, this time wondering whether or not the evidence for Mohammed Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent in Prague ought to be looked at again.

Captain Ed and I have been going back and forth on this both in the comments section here and through e-mail. The gist of what Ed was saying was that in light of the Able Danger revelations, it is possible that the 9/11 Commission was predisposed to leave out certain bits of evidence that would run contrary to their findings. It is a good observation, one that I would agree with, but on the grounds that that is just par for the course in any type of research that has to sift through tons of data points.

Another valid point he makes is that his earlier post simply calls for an investigation into what the Iraqi agents were doing in Germany--with a bit of speculation thrown in their to boot. Fine by me. The 9/11 Commission Report is a flawed document just like all other government reports. It is not the final word on 9/11 and those that treat it as such fail to grasp the enormity of the task the Commission had under time constraints. I suspect the next twenty years will produce countless dissertations on the subject by Ph.D. candidates, each one contributing a new piece of information to the overall story of the attrocities that took place on that day.

One of the points that I made to Ed in an e-mail was regarding the validity of his source and his interpretation of the story. My objection was simply that an English synopsis of an Arabic newspaper in Germany may not be the most reliable source. Especially when that source claims the CIA was brought to Germany--something that I am sure they could not have known. My experience with Arabic papers is that any person wearing a business suit and working for the U.S. in any peripheral capacity can be accused of being a 'CIA Agent'.

Ed took up the challenge, and lo and behold, one of his army of readers was able to produce a corraborating account. So, according to MSM reports at the time, we have two Iraqi spies caught in Germany. The non-Arabic sources also mention nothing about the CIA or FBI getting involved and also nothing about a plot for Iraq to involve itself with fundamentalist Islamic terror groups to strike at US interests.

Ed is right that it would be nice to know what those Iraqi spies were doing in Germany. I second the motion. I'm not sure that such knowlege would have improved the 9/11 Report in any fundamental way, but it might have.

To imagine, though, that the fact that there were Iraqi agents in Germany somehow may be the missing link connecting Saddam Hussein to 9/11 is grasping at straws, in my opinion. Many of us on the right would like to believe that such a connection existed because we believe that that would somehow bolster support for the war. But the justness or unjustness of the Iraq invasion ultimately does not rest on whether or not the Baathist regime had anything to do with 9/11.

Further, the war we are fighting in Iraq now is a different war than the one we fought to overthrow the Hussein regime. It is not simply another phase of the same conflict, it is a different war. We are fighting different people and we now have different goals. In the invasion of Iraq we had the goal of toppling a hostile government that we had been at war with for a decade. Now, we are fighting Islamist jihadis engaged in a struggle to build a Taliban-like state in the vacuum created by the fall of the Baathists.

The second conflict is directly connected to 9/11. We do not need to look to a German Iraq-al Qaeda connection to see this, we simply need to look at the facts as they exist on the ground right now.

What is the name the jihadis have taken on themselves in Iraq? Al Qaeda. Who have they pledged their allegiance to? Osama bin Laden. The three main insurgent groups in Iraq (al Qaeda, The Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, and The Islamic Army in Iraq) all share the same general political philosophy as the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. All are part of the network of global jihad. They are our enemies and it they who we are fighting in Iraq today.

We are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, today. Unfortunately, many in the MSM do not understand the nature of the enemy in Iraq. To concede Iraq to these terrorist forces would be to create a nation state parrhia just like Afghanistan. Iraq would become the next place where large-scale jihadi training camps would operate openly.

We do not need to rewrite history to create a link between Iraq and 9/11. But if we wish to prevent another 9/11 attack from happening again, we must begin by making sure Iraq does not fall to the hands of al Qaeda terrorists who would love nothing more than to create another safe haven from which they could operate.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:45 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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