Here’s a Mini Project

17 Comments

1. 

   wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 7:19 pm

   Okay, I’ve searched from 9/10/2001 until 3/31/2002, for starters. I’ll start you off with the NYT Safire pieces.

   There are 3 Safire-written NYT pieces in that time period that reference Mohamed Atta.

   From 22 October 2001, “Advance the Story”, by William Safire, New York Times:

   To strengthen Saddam’s position in the Arab world during his 1998 crisis with the U.N., bin Laden established the “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and the Crusaders.” The Muslim-in-name Iraqi dictator reciprocated by promising secure refuge in Iraq for bin Laden and his key lieutenants if they were forced to flee Afghanistan.

   Bin Laden sent a delegation of his top Al Qaeda terrorists to Baghdad on April 25, 1998, to attend the grand celebration that week of Saddam’s birthday. It was then that Saddam’s bloody-minded son Uday agreed to receive several hundred Al Qaeda recruits for terrorist training in techniques unavailable in Afghanistan.

   That Baghdad birthday party, according to an unpublished spying report, celebrated something else: Uday Hussein’s agreement with bin Laden’s men to formally establish a joint force consisting of some of Al Qaeda’s fiercest “Afghan Arab” fighters and the covert combatants in Iraqi intelligence unit 999.

   This information does not include reports of the most recent contacts between the terrorist group and the terrorist state. However, combine that late-90’s groundwork to what is known of (a) bin Laden’s supply this year of 400 fanatic “Afghan Arabs” to Saddam to attack free Kurds in Iraq’s no-flight zone, and (b) this summer’s observed contacts of Al Qaeda’s suicide-hijacker Mohammed Atta with Iraqi spies under diplomatic cover in Prague. A pattern manifests itself.

   Does this web of eavesdropped-upon communication provide proof positive of Saddam’s participation in the Sept. 11 attack? No indisputable smoking gun may ever be found, but it is absurd to claim — in the face of what we already know — that Iraq is not an active collaborator with, harborer of, and source of sophisticated training and unconventional weaponry for bin Laden’s world terror network.

   [snip]

   From 12 November 2001, “Prague Connection”, by William Safire, New York Times:

   The undisputed fact connecting Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks is this: Mohamed Atta, who died at the controls of an airliner-missile, flew from Florida to Prague to meet on April 8 of this year with Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi consul.

   Al-Ani was known to the B.I.S., the Czech counterintelligence service, as a “case officer” of Iraqi intelligence working under diplomatic cover. “A case officer is not merely an agent,” notes Edward Jay Epstein, the espionage analyst and my fellow Angletonian. “An agent executes assignments, but a case officer serves as the intermediary between an agent and the state intelligence service controlling that agent.”

   Saddam has long been infuriated by the ability of Radio Free Europe to foment dissent inside Iraq. Wiretaps of Saddam’s Prague consulate led the B.I.S. to suspect al-Ani of enlisting agents to blow up R.F.E.’s Prague headquarters.

   Al-Ani usually met agents at his consular office, where he could plausibly appear to be issuing them visas. But in Atta’s case, the case officer took pains to avoid showing any direct link to Iraq. Why did the case officer meet Atta away from the Iraqi consulate? Surely the Iraqi, under round-the-clock surveillance, knew the B.I.S. would follow him.

   Epstein has a “false flag” theory: “A remote location in Prague, not connected to Iraq, would allow al-Ani to misidentify himself to Atta. Such an alias, or false flag, could both aid the recruitment by appealing to Atta’s ideological interest and conceal Iraq’s involvement. False flags are a common tool of recruitment by intelligence services.”

   Perhaps Saddam, hardly a devout Muslim, did not want to show his hand to bin Laden’s mid-level religious fanatics. The B.I.S. followed al-Ani to a clandestine meeting at a hotel with Atta, who had just come to the city. After that meeting, the Czechs shadowed Atta to the airport for his flight to the U.S.
   Why didn’t the B.I.S. inform the U.S. about Atta at that time? Here was a suspected plot against a large U.S.-financed facility; within two weeks, the Czechs declared his case officer, al-Ani, persona non grata and shipped him back to Baghdad. Were the C.I.A. and F.B.I. kept in the dark about his agent flying back and forth to America under his own name of Atta, or were our counterspies informed but did nothing?

   Last week, the Czech prime minister, Milos Zeman, confirmed to CNN that al-Ani and Atta met in Prague (which Czech officials had at first denied). But Zeman was eager to dissociate that meeting from planning to destroy New York’s twin towers: “Atta contacted some Iraq agent sic . . . to prepare a terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe.”

   Really? How does the Czech prime minister know what the Iraqi spymaster and Atta discussed? He could know only if the meeting were bugged or if al-Ani talked before being thrown out of Prague. Was the C.I.A. or F.B.I. informed about the U.S. interest in why al-Ani was ejected, and what travelers to America had recently been in secret contact with him?

   After all, Atta had flown from Virginia Beach, Fla., the day before and returned the following day. That shows urgency: one does not back and forth across the Atlantic within 72 hours to meet secretly with a known Iraqi intelligence officer for no reason.

   We since have learned that Atta, who had made at least one earlier trip to Prague, returned to the U.S. to open a bank account at the Sun Bank in Florida and received $100,000 to finance his mission through an Arab emirate money changer. But before that money to finance his Sept. 11 attack could pass, Atta apparently needed to stop in Prague first, where Iraq’s al-Ani was running agents.

   The Prague connection links Saddam and bin Laden at the agent level. Now here is an unpublished report that suggests Saddam helps the terrorist leader on a personal level:

   In mid-May, two of Saddam’s secret service agents arrived at the clinic of Dr. Mohammed Khayal, Baghdad’s leading kidney specialist. The doctor hurriedly packed a bag and was escorted to a government car. Three days later, he was returned, and the building was soon abuzz with the word that Saddam’s Dr. Khayal had been to Afghanistan where his patient was Osama bin Laden.

   From 18 March 2002, “Protecting Saddam”, by William Safire, New York Times:

   Soviet propagandists used to touch up photographs to remove the face of a Kremlin official who had fallen from favor, making him a “nonperson.”

   The same disinformation technique is now being used to wipe out the fact of a meeting in Prague in April, 2001 — five months before the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. — between Mohamed Atta, the leading Qaeda hijacker, and Ahmed al-Ani, the Iraqi consul in Prague, who was Saddam Hussein’s intelligence case officer there.

   On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s foreign minister (like his boss, a former K.G.B. disinformation specialist) said of this widely reported Iraqi-Qaeda connection: “That is wrong information.”

   [snip]

   On solid evidence: The Czech intelligence agency, B.I.S., had the Iraqi embassy spy in Prague under constant visual and wiretap surveillance, especially after a threat to the Radio Free Europe headquarters there. Three months ago, after the absolve-Saddam campaign began to cast doubt on the report of the Atta-al Ani meeting at the Prague airport, Interior Minister Stanislav Gross issued a statement that “B.I.S. guarantees the information, so we stick by that information.” No backing away; on the contrary, strong reaffirmation.

   On corroboration of the evidence that Atta flew 7,000 miles, from Virginia Beach to Prague and back to Florida (his third trip to Prague in a year): The F.B.I. has car-rental and other records that Atta left for Prague on April 8, 2001, and returned on April 11. The B.I.S. report of the meeting that Saddam’s case officer had with the suicide hijacker fell precisely within those dates. Czech intelligence, in identifying al-Ani’s contact as Atta, had no knowledge of the F.B.I.’s evidence that independently corroborates Atta’s brief presence in Prague.

   On C.I.A. assessment of the evidence: James Risen reported in The New York Times last month that while not enough evidence ties Saddam specifically to Sept. 11, “senior American intelligence officials have concluded that the meeting between Mr. Atta and the Iraqi officer, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, did take place.” Congressional intelligence committees could confirm that with one secure phone call.

   [snip]

   • 

     BooMan on May 31, 2005 at 7:38 pm

     it’s far worse than I even remembered it as being.  Not a word of it was true.

   • 

     wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 7:44 pm

     Searching through UK Publications on the terms (Mohamed Atta) and Saddam gives me 59 hits; 42 of these come in the period from 9/10/2001 until Safire’s first column mentioning Atta on 22 October 2001.

     8 of the hits come in the period between Safire’s first column on 22 October 2001 and his second column on 12 November 2001.

     The remaining 9 hits fall between 12 November 2001 and 18 March 2002.

     There is a pattern of articles published in The Observer that precede Safire’s columns about Atta by a day (twice) or by two days (once).

     From 21 October 2001, “FOCUS SPECIAL: The Terrorism Crisis: OUTBREAK: So who is terrorising America with anthrax?”, by Ed Vulliamy and Ed Helmore in New York, The Observer:

     [snip]

     After the first appearances of anthrax at NBC television and the New York Times 10 days ago, sections of the US intelligence community, politicians and experts in the field were quick to see the hand of Saddam Hussein. First among them was the former CIA head, James Woolsey. Next came Richard Butler, a former director of the Unscom (United Nations Special Commission) project to root out Saddam’s massive arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and supervise their destruction.

     Butler went on to say that he believed the connection between Iraq and the anthrax attacks had been made in Prague. The argument completed a series of associations: the suspected suicide pilot Mohamed Atta was known to have met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and Egyptian authorities had told the CIA that al-Qaeda militants interrogated in Cairo had obtained small amounts of anthrax in the Czech capital.

     In the years following the Gulf war, UN inspectors found the Iraqi regime had invested vast resources in building up reserves of liquid anthrax. Iraq told the inspectors – as they were given the runaround – that all of it had been dumped into the ground, but Unscom never determined how much was destroyed.

     ALL WEEK THE political machinations over blaming Iraq went on behind the scenes. A finger pointed at Saddam Hussein strengthened the hand of the powerful Pentagon faction under Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, anxious to spread the Afghan war westward against the same regime it had argued should be toppled on the slipstream of victory in 1991, with US backing for insurgent Shias and Kurds.

     [snip]

     From 11 November 2001, “Focus Special: The Terrorism Crisis: THE IRAQI CONNECTION: Iraq is the target of American hawks who see its hand in terrorist attacks. But what is the evidence?”, by David Rose, The Observer:

     [snip]

     HIS FRIENDS call him Abu Amin, ‘the father of honesty’. At 43, he is one of Iraq’s most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as ‘M8’ – the department for ‘special operations’, such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre.

     Evidence is mounting that this meeting was not an isolated event. The Observer has learnt that Atta’s talks with al-Ani were only one of several apparent links between Iraq, the 11 September hijackers and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. Senior US intelligence sources say the CIA has ‘credible information’ that in the spring of this year, at least two other members of the hijacking team also met known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States. They are believed to be Atta’s closest associates and co-leaders, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah, the other two members of the ‘German cell ‘ who lived with Atta in Hamburg in the late 1990s.

     In the strongest official statement to date alleging Iraqi involvement in the new wave of anti-Western terrorism, on Friday night Milos Zeman, the Czech Prime Minister, told reporters and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, that the Czech authorities believed Atta and al-Ani met expressly to discuss a bombing. He said they were plotting to destroy the Prague-based Radio Free Europe with a truck stuffed with explosives, adding: ‘Yes, you cannot exclude also the hypothesis that they discussed football, ice hockey, weather and other topics. But I am not so sure.

     In Washington and Whitehall, a furious political battle is raging over the scope of the anti-terrorist war, and whether it should eventually include action against Iraq. According to the Foreign Office, British Ministers have responded to this prospect with ‘horror’, arguing that an attack on Saddam Hus sein would cause terrible civilian casualties and cement anti-Western anger across Middle East.

     [snip]

     THE FBI BELIEVES many of the 11 hijackers who made up the conspiracy’s ‘muscle’, Saudi Arabians who entered the US at a late stage and whose task was to overpower the aircrafts’ passengers and crew, trained at Afghan camps run by al-Qaeda. But they have no details: no times or places where any of these individuals learnt their skills. Meanwhile, it is now becoming clear that al-Qaeda is not the only organisation providing terrorist training for Muslim fundamentalists. Since the early 1990s, courses of this type have also been available in Iraq. At the beginning of October, two INC activists in London travelled to eastern Turkey. They had been told that a Mukhabarat colonel had crossed the border through Kurdistan and was ready to defect. The officer – codenamed Abu Zeinab – had extraordinary information about terrorist training in Iraq. In a safe house in Ankara, the two London-based activists took down Zeinab’s story. He had worked at a site which was already well known – Salman Pak, a large camp on a peninsular formed by a loop of the Tigris river south of Baghdad.

     However, what Zeinab had to say about the southern part of the camp was new. There, he said, separated from the rest of the facilities by a razor-wire fence, was a barracks used to house Islamic radicals, many of them Saudis from bin Laden’s Wahhabi sect, but also Egyptians, Yemenis, and other non-Iraqi Arabs.

     Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab said the foreigners’ camp was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. In a telephone interview with The Observer , Zeinab described the culture clash which took place when secular Baathists tried to train fundamentalists: ‘It was a nightmare! A very strange experience. These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn’t get home till late at night, just because of all this praying.’

     Asked whether he believed the foreigners’ camp had trained members of al-Qaeda, Zeinab said: ‘All I can say is that we had no structure to take on these people inside the regime. The camp was for organisations based abroad.’ One of the highlights of the six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. According to Zeinab, women were also trained in these techniques. Like the 11 September hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five.

     In Ankara, Zeinab was debriefed by the FBI and CIA for four days. Meanwhile he told the INC that if they wished to corroborate his story, they should speak to a man who had political asylum in Texas – Captain Sabah Khodad, who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994-5. He too has now told his story to US investigators. In an interiew with The Observer , he echoed Zeinab’s claims: ‘The foreigners’ training includes assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking. They were strictly separated from the rest of us. To hijack planes they were taught to use small knives. The method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp. When I saw the twin towers attack, the first thought that came into my head was, “this has been done by graduates of Salman Pak”.’

     Zeinab and Khodad said the Salman Pak students practised their techniques in a Boeing 707 fuselage parked in the foreigners’ part of the camp. Yesterday their story received important corrobo ration from Charles Duelfer, former vice chairman of Unscom, the UN weapons inspection team.
     Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training. ‘Of course we automatically took out the word “counter”,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect? Iraq presents a long-term strategic threat. Unfortunately, the US is not very good at recognising long-term strategic threats.’

     AT THE END of September, Donald Rumsfeld, the far from doveish US Defence Secretary, told reporters there was ‘no evidence’ that Iraq was involved in the atrocities. That judgment is slowly being rewritten.

     [snip]

     From 10 March 2002, “Comment: Without Prejudice: Blair’s just a Bush baby: The US President may like to have Tony by his side, but it’s crystal-clear that he isn’t listening”, by Nick Cohen, The Observer:

     [snip]

     Using the massacres in New York and Washington as an excuse to go for Iraq never made sense. Saddam is a secular tyrant who prefers Stalin to Muhammad. An alliance between Baghdad and an al-Qaeda whose members would cheerfully have killed Saddam seemed unlikely, even to those who understood the ‘my enemy’s enemy’ principle. A story that Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before crashing into the Twin Towers played into Rumsfeld’s hands and swept round the world. It was quietly put out of its misery in January when the Czech police admitted they had no evidence that Atta had talked to the Iraqi Embassy. Perhaps one day we will know whether the newspapers which ‘revealed’ the ‘Prague connection’ were the victims of a cock-up or black propaganda.

     Britain’s opposition to extending the war was relayed in private to privileged journalists. When the privilege was granted so promiscuously that Lefty hacks received it, the secret was in plain view. New Labour hinted in public that it thought the Rumsfeld faction was dan gerously boneheaded. When John Negroponte, Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, said in October that America reserved the right to attack other states, Jack Straw dismissed him as a Beltway chatterer. ‘There are always statements coming out of Washington,’ he said breezily. ‘Washington is a very large place but this military coalition is about action in respect of targets in Afghanistan.’ The Foreign Secretary’s confidence that Britain and Powell had persuaded Bush to limit the war couldn’t have been more misplaced. If he now thinks invading Iraq won’t set the Middle East on fire, he should explain what apart from a desire to get in line behind Bush has made him change his mind.

     [snip]

     • 

       wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 7:47 pm

       I said that The Observer’s stories ran a day before Safire’s twice, and two days before Safire’s once.

       They did run a day before on two occasions; the last “Comment” piece was 8 days before Safire’s 18 March 2002 piece.

       I apologize for the error.

       • 

         BooMan on May 31, 2005 at 7:53 pm

         thanks wander, can you see why I asked for this info?

         • 

           wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 8:16 pm

           Way back when, I didn’t even know what “Daily Kos” was. I spent my time inside the NYT’s online forums and used their content as fodder for my rants and raves. Safire’s pieces in the runup to the illegal invasion of Iraq really set me off.

           I appreciate what you’re doing here and hope this lends a hand — though, at this point, I have to argue about this being a “Mini” project! I’m going to finish the Atta stuff tonight and come back tomorrow for another step down your list, unless some other good-hearted soul with Nexis access helps me out here.

         • 

           BooMan on May 31, 2005 at 8:27 pm

           if it is easier, you can email me a Word.doc with the articles.  That saves the trouble of multiple posts and snips.

         • 

           wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 8:37 pm

           I can email the articles to you directly from Nexis; just let me know where to send them!

           That said, I think it’s important that your audience here gets a chance to re-read Safire’s words, doing my best to keep them in their original context without ripping off the whole column (though with the 2nd one he wrote, I just felt I had to share the whole thing).

           I’ll do both; send you the full text of the articles, and summarize here. The subjects you and Susan are writing about are things that ePluribus Media isn’t really working on, but I feel they are important; I want to share some time here and help push these stories, too, if and when I can.

         • 

           BooMan on May 31, 2005 at 8:40 pm

           Good idea.  Just email the admin at the bottom of the page.  And thanks again.

         • 

           wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 9:21 pm

           Due to the bulk of the UK articles, I sent them Keyword in Context rather than full text. Hope they don’t clog up your Inbox.

2. 

   wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 8:12 pm

   In the period from 3/31/2002 to 3/31/2003, there are 8 Safire-written New York Times pieces that specifically mention Mohamed Atta. Here are the first four:

   The New York Times

   15 April 2002 Monday

   “Tenet’s Palestinian”, by William Safire

   [snip]

   And when we walk back this cat, we find the name of Fuad Shubaki, Arafat’s arms buyer, on many documents. He was spotted in Baghdad with Iraqi officials in August of last year, one month before Sept. 11 and four months after Mohamed Atta’s rendezvous with Saddam Hussein’s man in Prague.

   The C.I.A. fails to ask: Who benefits most from Arafat’s decisions to reject statehood, launch a terror war on Israeli civilians and refuse a cease-fire? Surely not Palestinians. The answer is Saddam, terror’s foremost supporter, who gains time to build his bombs while world media fixate on Israel’s self-defense.

   George Tenet apparently doesn’t grasp that. He is a likable, patriotic bureaucrat who has President Bush’s trust as he works through Brent Scowcroft to seize total control of all U.S. intelligence. The trouble is that our long-bamboozled D.C.I. is in over his head already.

   The New York Times

   9 May 2002 Monday

   “Mr. Atta Goes to Prague”, by William Safire

   [snip]

   A misdirection play is under way in the C.I.A.’s all-out attempt to discredit an account of a suspicious meeting in Prague a year ago. Mohamed Atta, destined to be the leading Sept. 11 suicide hijacker, was reported last fall by Czech intelligence to have met at least once with Saddam Hussein’s espionage chief in the Iraqi Embassy — Ahmed al-Ani, a spymaster whom the Czechs were keeping under tight surveillance.

   If the report proves accurate, a connection would exist between Al Qaeda’s murder of 3,000 Americans and Iraq’s Saddam. That would clearly be a casus belli, calling for our immediate military response, separate from the need to stop a demonstrated mass killer from acquiring nuclear and germ weapons. Accordingly, high C.I.A. and Justice officials — worried about exposure of the agency’s inability to conduct covert operations — desperately want Atta’s Saddam connection to be disbelieved.

   They are telling favored journalists: Shoot this troublesome story down. In March, a Washington Post columnist obliged with: “hard intelligence to support the Baghdad-bin Laden connection is somewhere between ‘slim’ and ‘none.’ ” In April, Newsweek headlined: “A spy story tying Saddam to 9-11 is looking very flimsy,” and its Michael Isikoff wrote: “the much touted ‘Prague connection’ appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.”

   [snip]

   Whom do you believe — a responsible official on the scene speaking on the record, with no ax to grind, or U.S. spooks who may be covering up a missed signal from Prague about Sept. 11 and are also fearful of revealing their weakness in Iraq?

   Hard-liners can play this background game, too. A “senior Bush administration official” not in the protect-Saddam cabal tells me: “You cannot say the Czech report about a meeting in 2001 between Atta and the Iraqi is discredited or disproven in any way. The Czechs stand by it and we’re still in the process of pursuing it and sorting out the timing and venue. There’s no doubt Atta was in Prague in 2000, and a subsequent meeting is at least plausible.”

   [snip]

   The New York Times

   27 May 2002 Monday

   “The Rowley Memo”, by William Safire

   [snip]

   I was struck by deja vu in her account of headquarters’ dismissal of the warning from French intelligence about the suspect detained in Minneapolis. Higher-ups told the field agents that maybe it was another Zacarias Moussaoui — just as the spooks at C.I.A. told reporters that the Arab photographed meeting an Iraqi spymaster in Prague was another man with the name of Mohamed Atta.

   Last week, recalling last August’s request by George W. Bush to the C.I.A.’s George Tenet for a memo detailing the terrorist threat inside the U.S., I opined that the president had asked the wrong man. The officer charged with that responsibility is the director of the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. chief failed to ask the F.B.I. for his information. That would have blasted loose the suppressed reports from Phoenix and Minneapolis.

   In unattributable response, a “senior administration official” claimed that some analyst at C.I.A. talked to somebody down the line at the F.B.I. That’s foof dust; when the president needs to know the threat, our national security staff must knock top heads to provide it quickly and thoroughly.

   [snip]

   The New York Times

   6 June 2002 Monday

   “What Else Are We Missing?”, by William Safire

   [snip]

   In May and June of 2002, State Department officials were arguing strenuously for no military action to achieve “regime change” until Turkey was fully a part of a broad anti-Saddam coalition. Mid-level generals, fearful of comparisons with our cakewalk victory of a decade ago, were infuriating their Pentagon superiors with leaks downmouthing the whole operation.

   The C.I.A., having failed previously in a Baghdad coup attempt, could not decide on which indigenous Iraqi dissidents to equip and train for an uprising to support our invasion. To restrain Bush’s hawks, C.I.A. doves denied any connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, despite hard intelligence linking Mohamed Atta, the leading suicide hijacker, with the Iraqi spymaster in Prague — a fact reaffirmed in June to The Prague Post by Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech ambassador to the U.N.

   [snip]

   Shocked Americans would be asking: Who knew what and when? Did the C.I.A. inform the president that Rihab Taha, “Dr. Germs,” had provided anthrax and other biological agents to Saddam’s Republican Guard? Did the president know that an untested atomic device could be detonated to punish invaders along with the Iraqi people? If so, should we have saved lives by going in earlier? Or knowing the cost later, should we have sought to appease the dictator?

   [snip]

   • 

     wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 8:31 pm

     The New York Times

     9 June 2002

     “The Way We Live Now”, by William Safire

     [NOTE: This if from Safire’s “On Language” column and NOT an Op-Ed piece.]

     [snip]

     In my Op-Ed incarnation, I’ve been in a running battle with our intelligence agencies about their all-out campaign to discredit evidence of a visit to Saddam Hussein’s spymaster in Prague by the suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta. I called the torrent of self-protective leaks by C.I.A. and F.B.I. sotto voce spokesmen “a misdirection play,” and defined this as a move by an adept offensive lineman: “He blocks his man toward the center; as the defender pushes back hard, the misdirecting lineman gives way, seemingly overcome by the countercharge — as his running back scoots through the hole near the center left by the defender.”

     Watch out for those sports metaphors. “What you described as a misdirection play,” e-mails an anonymous Sunday couch potato, “is really an influence block. A misdirection play is when running backs and sometimes linemen flow in one direction and the ball carrier, usually after a delay, runs in the opposite direction.”

     [snip]

     The New York Times

     22 August 2002

     “Saddam and Terror”, by William Safire

     [snip]

     Such verification of data obtained from the captured terrorists awakened C.I.A. bureaucrats who for nearly a year waved reporters away from evidence of Qaeda-Iraqi links lest it justify U.S. action. Belatedly, a C.I.A. team interrogated some of the terrorists held in northern Iraq — comparing what they found with information gleaned from Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

     Even religiously motivated terrorists crack in dismay at how much the interrogator already knows. When added to prisoners’ family details provided by Kurdish sources, the scope of our knowledge led captives in Kurdistan to talk about poison production and Iraqi links because they figured there was little left to hide.

     The new information has changed much intelligence analysis. The C.I.A. has even stopped discrediting reports from Czech intelligence about a different point of Qaeda-Saddam contact: the meeting between the Sept. 11 hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta, and a top Saddam spymaster in Prague.

     [snip]

     Let’s not pretend we must “make the case” that Saddam personally directed 9/11. The need to strike at an aggressive despot before he gains the power to blackmail us with the horrific weapons he is building and hiding is apparent to most Americans, including those who will bear the brunt of the fight.

     [snip]

     The New York Times

     31 October 2002

     “On Playing Hunches”, by William Safire

     [snip]

     . . .A hunch is not news and should not be reported as such, but informed speculation can open minds and even lead to news. A columnist should play a hunch now and then, taking readers beyond the published news, using logic and experience to figure out what may be happening now or to predict what will happen soon. . . .

     [snip]

     Another example of risk-taking columny: Czech intelligence agents reported that Mohamed Atta, the lead suicide hijacker, met only months before Sept. 11 with a Saddam Hussein spymaster in Prague. C.I.A. analysts covering their posteriors rejected any data establishing connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and went to great lengths to discredit the report in the U.S. press.

     Because the C.I.A. had refused to interrogate Al Qaeda assassins captured by Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, I had a hunch that our spooks’ overly eager “discreditation” of the Czech report was misleading. After checking with sources in the Bush administration and overseas, I stuck with the original story made known by the Czech prime minister and his cabinet colleagues.

     But lo and behold, The New York Times last week reported from Prague that President Vaclav Havel “quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm” the Atta-Iraqi meeting. Havel had “discreetly called Washington” to tell senior Bush officials to ignore the reports.

     Wow — Havel personally intervened, calling the Bush White House himself to “quietly, discreetly” contradict his intelligence service and fellow officials? That was a news story deserving its front-page play and subsequent editorial. My e-mail screen sparkled with gleeful nyah-nyahs from readers certain this proved Saddam had no terrorist connections and should be left alone. I brooded about my hunch.

     But lo and re-behold, two days later The New York Times reported this denial from Havel’s spokesman: “The president did not call the White House about this. The president never spoke with any American government official about Atta, not with Bush, not with anyone else.”

     [snip]

     The New York Times

     30 January 2003

     “The Mourning After”, by William Safire

     [snip]

     3. When the postwar books are written, a former Iraqi spymaster with knowledge of the suicide attacker Mohamed Atta’s perhaps unwitting connection to Saddam will eagerly come forth to spill all he knows to save his neck or sell his memoirs. Suspected followers of Osama bin Laden like Musaab Zarqawi and Mullah Krekar, if alive, will further link Al Qaeda to Saddam’s mukhabarat police.

     [snip]

     • 

       wanderindiana on May 31, 2005 at 8:55 pm

       Searching through UK Publications on the terms (Mohamed Atta) and Saddam from 3/31/2002 to 3/31/2003 gives me only 29 hits this time (searching on Atta’s name alone results in 179 hits).

       While the bulk of Safire’s articles mentioning Atta by name during the period come between January and June, all 29 of the Atta/Saddam hits come between July 2002 and March 2003. None of them really seem to directly correspond with the dates of Safire’s columns, with one exception — an article appearing August 22, 2002 in the Daily Telegraph:

       “US fears al-Qa’eda threat is growing in Iraq”, by David Rennie in Washington

       SENIOR members of al-Qa’eda have taken refuge in Iraq, including a handful of “second and third-tier” operatives, with the rank to plan further terrorist strikes, American intelligence officials believe.

       The accusation, if proved, could offer an important boost to the Bush administration’s efforts to convince allies, both in America and beyond, that a pre-emptive strike on Saddam Hussein is imperative, before he uses weapons of mass destruction or hands them to terrorist allies.

       Leading conservatives in the administration, who advocate swift action against Iraq, have been leaning hard on the intelligence services to provide evidence of direct links between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks.

       America has said before that al-Qa’eda fighters have ended up in northern Iraq, some in Kurdish-controlled areas. What is new is the number and senior rank of them, intelligence and defence officials told the Washington Post.

       There is some dispute over whether they are being sheltered by Saddam’s government. “They aren’t the official guests of the government,” one official said, adding that they were effectively “on the run”.

       But Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary said: “In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near total control over its population, it’s very hard to imagine that the government is not aware of what’s taking place in the country.”

       To add to the confusion, there are reported to be over a hundred militants with links to al-Qa’eda in areas of Iraq controlled by Kurdish groups opposed to Saddam. The Kurdish enclave in norther Iraq is protected by one of the two “no-fly zones” enforced by American and British aircraft.
       The Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, said on Tuesday that there were al-Qa’eda members in Iraq, but that they were all in northern areas under Kurdish control.

       Kurdish groups supported by the US government have complained that hundreds of al-Qa’eda-linked fighters arrived in south-eastern Iraq after the war in Afghanistan, including Afghans, Chechens and Arabs. These fighters, who belong to an Islamic group called Ansar-al-Islam, stand accused of destroying centuries-old shrines, assassination attempts and bringing Taliban-style religious controls to villages around the town of Biarah.

       Ansar-al-Islam was recently reported to have tested crude chemical weapons on farm animals at a site in northern Iraq.

       The group is accused of accepting arms and equipment from Saddam for use against Kurdish nationalist groups. Similar confusion surrounds the strongest reported evidence of a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden: the alleged meeting in April 2001 between the September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.

       The report, which first came from the Czech domestic intelligence agency, has been exhaustively investigated by US intelligence agents but they have failed conclusively to place Atta in Prague on the day in question.

       President George W Bush met defence and national security advisers yesterday at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He said the subject of Iraq had not come up. “We will continue to talk with our friends and allies,” he said, adding that an end to Saddam’s regime was “in the interest of the world”.

3. 

   ATinNM on June 1, 2005 at 3:13 pm

   For spending your time doing this research.

   • 

     wanderindiana on June 9, 2005 at 2:56 pm

     Thanks for the mojo, everyone!

     I haven’t forgotten this thread–I’ve been caught up in some ePluribus Media business this past week. Look for more information here over the weekend.

4. 

   wanderindiana on June 13, 2005 at 12:56 am

   One column:

   The New York Times

   30 September 2002

   “Selling Our Secrets”, by William Safire

   They never learn.

   Remember, a couple of years ago, the scandals about the way corporate giants like Hughes Electronics and Loral Space, led by big Democratic contributors, sold secret U.S. satellite technology to Chinese aerospace companies and semiconductor manufacturers?

   Remember how right-wingers like me got all worked up about our shortsighted government and venal executives placing the interests of international trade over the needs of national defense?

   I am ashamed to report that the Bush administration is getting ready to let our ever-hungry multinationals do the same thing. This time, however, it would all be legalized. If current legislation (Senate 149, the Export Administration Act) being urged by the White House passed, American executives would be encouraged to sell the fruits of their most advanced research to foreign nationals who may not wish us well.

   The arguments used by the merchants of American defense technology: (1) selling technology overseas that is "mass marketed" here helps bring down our unit cost at home, as well as benefits business; (2) we’re only selling it for good uses, even though its "dual use" could help them penetrate our defenses; (3) "foreign availability" — they could always buy something almost as good from the Germans or French.

   What’s more, say the sell-anybody-anything advocates in the Clinton-Bush Commerce Department, because we have an embargo on sales to Iraq, relaxed export rules won’t help Saddam.

   Last things first: Iraq buys dual-use nuclear components through cutouts who could easily buy them from us. Take high-strength aluminum tubes, for example, which can be used in bicycles — but a thousand of them in easily hidden gas centrifuges can produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear bomb every year. Under the proposed law, a country like Russia or Jordan could buy ours and re-sell them to Saddam with no weapons inspectors the wiser.

   You like the composite glass fibers in your tennis racquet? A sinister use is to form the rotors of those centrifuges, and their export has been controlled for 20 years. No more, if those who would sell our technology to multifarious middlemen have their way.

   Nor would our embargo on shipments to Iraq stop our leakage of secrets. China’s Huawei Technologies, which could not have been built for a decade without exported American technology, violated the U.N. embargo by selling fiber optic products to Saddam. He now uses them in his air defense system to jeopardize U.S. pilots.

   We should not fall for the "dual use" dodge. Germany’s Siemens, reported Gary Milhollin of the watchdog Wisconsin Project, legally sold Saddam krytron electronic switches, which doctors now use to destroy kidney stones. When Iraq then sought 120 more as "spare parts," it dawned on Siemens that the switches are also used in setting off the chain reaction in nuclear weapons.

   Bush can say that in his 2000 campaign he promised business leaders to lift export controls. But that was before Sept. 11. Now those controls –which worked well for decades against the Soviets — need strengthening, not weakening. Perhaps our National Security Council has been getting pressure from India and Pakistan, each of which wants our missile technology. By accommodating these nuclear powers, we might gain two allies but would make the world more dangerous.

   America does not need this dirty business. It amounts to only a few billion dollars in sales, and its military misuse — through copycat "reverse engineering," a Chinese specialty — costs American taxpayers far more than that to defend against.

   A handful of hard-line senators (Jon Kyl, Jesse Helms, Richard Shelby, John McCain and Fred Thompson) wrote Bush this month to stop pushing this bill this year. They urged instead that he create a new bill "that strikes the right balance between national security and trade" lest it cause "public divisions among strong supporters of your administration at a time when cohesiveness is an absolute necessity."

   Some old hands remember the predations of yesteryear. Newcomers have to be reminded.

      

   • 

     wanderindiana on June 13, 2005 at 1:20 am

     Mention of “aluminum tubes” and “Iraq” first appeared in UK press on 8 September 2002; articles appeared in The Observer, The Sunday Herald, and The Sunday Mirror after a Camp David summit between George W. Bush and Tony Blair. The UK Press picked up the story again the next day, 9 September 2002, with 11 stories in Chemical News and Intelligence, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, at Economist.com; in the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, and The Times.

     The flurry that most directly preceded the Safire article, however, came on 25 September 2002, after Tony Blair announced selected contents of his infamous “Iraq Dossier”, with 10 articles appearing that day in the Daily Record, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, and The Times.

     One of The Guardian‘s articles also mentions the “attempts” to obtain uranium from Africa (Mr. Kay is chief UN weapons inspector from 1991 to 1992 David Kay):

     One of the key allegations in the dossier – that the Iraqis have tried to procure uranium from Africa – did not come as a surprise to Mr Kay who said that the claim was first made by an Iraqi defector. Basing this claim on “intelligence” in the dossier suggests that MI6 may have better information than the defector, but the information is too vague to be able to make a judgment.