This is long overdue...will the Vast, LeftWingMedyuhWhore'd report it?!
FReegards...MUD
Thanks for the ping ! ...
A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam-al Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and is currently sitting in a Kurdish prison. Al-Shamari says that he worked for a man who was Saddam's envoy to al Qaeda.Before recounting details from my January 29 interview, some caution is necessary. Al-Shamari's account was compelling and filled with specific information that would either make him a skilled and detailed liar or a man with information that the U.S. public needs to hear. My Iraqi escort informed me that al-Shamari has been in prison since March 2002, that U.S. officials have visited him several times, and that his story has remained consistent. There was little language barrier; my Arabic skills allowed me to understand much of what al-Shamari said, even before translation. Finally, subsequent conversations with U.S. government officials in Washington and Baghdad, as well as several articles written well before this one, indicate that al-Shamari's claims have been echoed by other sources throughout Iraq.
The 9/11 congressional inquiry in the most comprehensive inquiry to date into the attacks makes no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, except for a passing reference in the testimony of CIA director George Tenet to the possibility that hijacker Mohammed Atta may or may not have met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. Czech authorities had originally alerted the U.S. to such a possibility, but later withdrew the claim, which was always doubted by FBI officials who had information placing Atta in the U.S. on each of the days either side of the purported Prague encounter. Claims of an Atta meeting with an Iraqi agent were never considered sufficiently strong to include either in President Bush's State of the Union address or in Secretary of State Powell's UN testimony. And U.S. authorities are now in a position to definitively answer the question of just who the Iraqi agent met that day in Prague, since he's recently been detained in Iraq. But the claim of Iraqi involvement in the attack or with the organization responsible simply does not feature in the report.