Stephen Hayes:See No Evil, Hear No Evil(What the 9/11 Commission narrative left out: Iraqis)

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.

When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman.

These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?

The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. And two of them--Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir--went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center, at least partly because of efforts made on their behalf by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Both men returned to Iraq--Yasin fled there in 1993 with the active assistance of the Iraqi government. For ten years in Iraq, Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing by the regime, support that ended only with the coalition intervention in March 2003.

Readers of The Weekly Standard may be familiar with the stories of Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Readers of the 9/11 Commission's final report are not. Those three individuals are nowhere mentioned in the 428 pages that comprise the body of the 9/11 Commission report. Their names do not appear among the 172 listed in Appendix B of the report, a table of individuals who are mentioned in the text. Two brief footnotes mention Shakir.

Why? Why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention Abdul Rahman Yasin, who admitted his role in the first World Trade Center attack, which killed 6 people, injured more than 1,000, and blew a hole seven stories deep in the North Tower? It's an odd omission, especially since the commission named no fewer than five of his accomplices.

Why would the 9/11 Commission neglect Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a man who was photographed assisting a 9/11 hijacker and attended perhaps the most important 9/11 planning meeting?

And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center?

AS THE TWO SIDES in the current flap over Able Danger, a Pentagon intelligence unit tracking al Qaeda before 9/11, exchange claims and counterclaims in the news media, the work of the 9/11 Commission is receiving long overdue scrutiny. It may be the case, as three individuals associated with the Pentagon unit claim, that Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta in January or February 2000 and that the 9/11 Commission simply ignored this information because it clashed with the commission's predetermined storyline. We should soon know more. Whatever the outcome of that debate, the 9/11 Commission's deliberate exclusion of the Iraqis from its analysis is indefensible.

The investigation into the 9/11 attacks began with an article of faith among those who had conducted U.S. counterterrorism efforts throughout the 1990s: Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not--could not have been--involved in any way. On September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks, George W. Bush asked Richard Clarke to investigate the attacks and possible Iraqi involvement in them. Clarke, as he relates in his bestselling book, was offended even to be asked. He knew better.

Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, started from the same assumption. So did Douglas MacEachin, a former deputy director of the CIA for intelligence who led the commission's study of al Qaeda and was responsible for the commission's conclusion that there was "no collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. (Over the course of the commission's life, MacEachin refused several interviews with The Weekly Standard because, we were told, he disagreed with our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.)

From the evidence now available, it seems clear that Saddam Hussein did not direct the 9/11 attacks. Few people have ever claimed he did. But some four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and one year after the 9/11 Commission released its final report, there is much we do not know. The determination of these officials to write out of the history any Iraqi involvement in terrorism against America has contributed mightily to public misperceptions about the former Iraqi regime and the war on terror.

HERE IS WHAT WE KNOW TODAY about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. In August 1999, Shakir, a 37-year-old Iraqi, accepted a position as a "facilitator" at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A "facilitator" works for an airline and assists VIP travelers with paperwork required for entry and other logistical issues. Shakir got the job because someone in the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia wanted him to have it. He started that fall.

Although Shakir officially worked for Malaysian Airlines, his contact in the Iraqi embassy controlled his schedule. On January 5, 2000, Shakir apparently received an assignment from his embassy contact. He was to escort a recent arrival through immigration at the airport. Khalid al Mihdhar, a well-connected al Qaeda member who would later help hijack American Airlines Flight 77, had come to Malaysia for an important al Qaeda meeting that would last at least three days. (Shakir may have also assisted Nawaf al Hazmi, another hijacker, thought to have arrived on January 4, 2000.)

Malaysian intelligence photographed Shakir greeting al Mihdhar at the airport and walking him to a waiting car. But rather than see the new arrival off, he hopped in the car with al Mihdhar and accompanied him to the meeting. Malaysian intelligence has provided its photographs to the CIA. While U.S. officials can place Shakir at the meeting with the hijackers and several high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, they do not know whether Shakir participated actively. (Also present at the meeting were Hambali, al Qaeda's top man in South Asia, and Khallad, later identified as the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole.)

The meeting concluded on January 8, 2000. Shakir reported to work at the airport on January 9 and January 10, and then never again. Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaz al Hazmi also disappeared briefly, then flew from Bangkok, Thailand, to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.

Shakir, the Iraqi-born facilitator, would be arrested six days after the September 11 attacks by authorities in Doha, Qatar. According to an October 7, 2002, article by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, "A search of Shakir's apartment in Doha, the country's capital, yielded a treasure trove, including telephone records linking him to suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Project Bojinka, a 1994 Manila plot to blow up civilian airliners over the Pacific Ocean." (Isikoff, it should be noted, has been a prominent skeptic of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.)

Shakir had contact information for a lot of bad people. As noted, one was a Kuwaiti, Ibrahim Suleiman, whose fingerprints were found on the bombmaking manuals U.S. authorities allege were used in preparation for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Suleiman was convicted of perjury and deported to Jordan. Another was Musab Yasin, the brother of 1993 Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin. Yet another was Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, brother of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, now in U.S. custody. Shakir also had an old number for Taba Investments, an al Qaeda front group. It was the number long used by Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim, the highest-ranking Iraqi member of al Qaeda. According to testimony from al Qaeda informants, Salim maintained a good relationship with Saddam's intelligence service.

Despite all of this, the Qatari authorities released Shakir shortly after they arrested him.

On October 21, 2001, Shakir flew to Amman, Jordan, where he hoped to board a plane to Baghdad. But authorities in Jordan arrested him for questioning. Shakir was held in a Jordanian prison for three months without being charged, prompting Amnesty International to write the Jordanian government seeking an explanation. The CIA questioned Shakir and concluded that he had received training in counter-interrogation techniques. Shortly after Shakir was detained, Saddam's government began to pressure Jordanian intelligence--with a mixture of diplomatic overtures and threats--to release Shakir. They got their wish on January 28, 2002. He is believed to have returned promptly to Baghdad.

I have discussed Shakir with nine U.S. government officials--policymakers and intelligence officials alike. The timeline above represents the consensus view.

Two weeks before the 9/11 Commission's final report was released to the public, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released its own evaluation of the intelligence on Iraq. The Senate report added to the Shakir story.

A note about that last sentence: The Senate committee report is a devastating indictment of the CIA's woefully inadequate collection of intelligence on Iraq, and its equally flawed analysis. It is of course possible that the CIA's judgment about al Mudaris is correct, but the bulk of the report inspires no confidence that it is.

Consider the three new facts in this brief summary. One, Shakir himself told interrogators that an Iraqi embassy employee got him the job that allowed him to help the hijacker(s). Two, that Iraqi embassy employee was Ra'ad al Mudaris. Three, another source identified al Mudaris as former Iraqi Intelligence.

All of this information was known to the U.S. intelligence community months before the 9/11 Commission completed its investigation. And yet none of it appeared in the final report.

Two footnotes are the sum total of what the 9/11 Commission had to say about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Here is the more substantive, footnote 49 to Chapter 6, on page 502 of the 567-page report: "Mihdhar was met at the Kuala Lumpur airport by Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national. Reports that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi Fedayeen turned out to be incorrect. They were based on a confusion of Shakir's identity with that of an Iraqi Fedayeen colonel with a similar name, who was later (in September 2001) in Iraq at the same time Shakir was in police custody in Qatar." The report is sourced to a briefing from the CIA's counterterrorism center and a story in the Washington Post. And that's it.

Readers of the 9/11 Commission report who bothered to study the footnotes might wonder who Shakir was, what he was doing with a 9/11 hijacker in Malaysia, and why he was ever "in police custody in Qatar." They might also wonder why the report, while not addressing those questions, went out of its way to provide information about who he was not. Such readers are still wondering.

There is no doubt the 9/11 Commission had this information at its disposal. On the very day it released its final report, commissioner John Lehman told me that Shakir's many connections to al Qaeda and Saddam's regime suggested something more than random chance.

So how is it that the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report contains a substantive account of Shakir's mysterious contribution to the 9/11 plot, while the 9/11 Commission report--again, released two weeks later--simply ignores it?

We now know even more about Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact, Ra'ad al Mudaris. The post-Saddam Iraqi government launched its own, secret investigation of al Mudaris and his activities. Al Mudaris was a "local employee" of the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur. That is, he was an Iraqi already living in Malaysia when he began working officially for the embassy. Although Shakir named him as his Iraqi embassy contact and another source noted his affiliation with the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the U.S. government never arrested al Mudaris. He continued his nominal employment at the Iraqi embassy in Kuala Lumpur even after the Iraq war, outliving the regime that had employed him. He left that position early last fall, shortly after he was named publicly in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report. A senior Iraqi government official tells The Weekly Standard that al Mudaris still lives in Malaysia, a free man.

BY THE END OF LAST WEEK, the demands for more information on Able Danger had reached fever pitch. The Pentagon claimed to have launched an aggressive investigation into the project. 9/11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean was demanding more information on Able Danger from the National Security Council. And Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fired off a hard-hitting letter to FBI director Robert Mueller demanding answers to a series of questions about the Pentagon unit and its interactions with the FBI.

Answers about Able Danger would be nice, but it is surely long past time for answers on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Musab Yasin. The 9/11 Commission itself and other relevant bodies should reexamine Shakir's role in the 9/11 plot and his connections to the 1993 World Trade Center plotters. The Bush administration should move quickly to declassify all of the intelligence the U.S. government possesses on Shakir and the Yasin brothers. The Senate and House intelligence committee should demand answers on the three Iraqis from the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI.

* Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Doha, Qatar, just six days after the 9/11 attacks. How was he apprehended so quickly? Was the CIA monitoring his activities? What did the 9/11 Commission know about this arrest? And why wasn't it included in the 9/11 Commission's final report?

* Who identified Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact, Ra'ad al Mudaris, as former Iraqi Intelligence? Is the source credible? If not, why not?

* Have other detainees been asked about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir? If so, what have they said?

* What do the former employees of the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia tell us about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Ra'ad al Mudaris?

* Has anyone from the U.S. government interviewed Ra'ad al Mudaris? If so, how does he explain his activities?

* Have the names Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Ra'ad al Mudaris surfaced in any of the documents captured in postwar Iraq from the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad?

* How long was the phone call between Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the safehouse shortly before the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

* Does the U.S. government have other indications that Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were in contact, either before or after that attack?

* Vice President Dick Cheney has spoken publicly about documents that indicate Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing upon his return to Iraq in 1993. The FBI is blocking declassification of those documents, despite the fact that Yasin is on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list. Why?

* Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir were all believed to be in Iraq. Where are they today?

Spotlight on Shakir

Deroy Murdock
National Review Online
June 3, 2004

Additional records further illuminate Iraqi complicity in the September 11 massacre. As a May 27 Wall Street Journal editorial reported, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir's name appears on three different rosters of the late Uday Hussein's prestigious paramilitary group, the Saddam Fedayeen. A government source told the Journal that the papers identify Shakir as a lieutenant colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen.

Shakir worked as a VIP airport greeter and facilitator for Malaysian Airlines at the airport in Kuala Lumpur, a position reputedly arranged by intelligence officers at Iraq's Malaysian embassy. On January 5, 2000, Shakir allegedly welcomed Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi to Kuala Lampur and escorted them through immigration and on to the Kuala Lumpur Hotel. That's where these September 11 hijackers met with 9/11 conspirators Ramzi bin al Shibh and Tawfiz al Atash. Five days later, according to The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes (he is also author of the new book The Connection), Shakir vanished.

On January 15, al Midhar and al Hamzi quietly flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Nearly eight months later, they very loudly smashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

Saddam Fedayeen Lieutenant Colonel Shakir resurfaced on September 17, 2001, in Qatari handcuffs. His pockets and apartment yielded, among other things, phone numbers for the contacts and safe houses of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. Shakir also possessed information on "Operation Bojinka," al Qaeda's 1995 conspiracy to explode 12 passenger jets simultaneously over the Pacific. Shakir passed from Qatari to Jordanian custody before being released after three months of Iraqi pressure. He reportedly returned to Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.

Papers pulled from the Mukhabarat's Baghdad headquarters indicate that Saddam Hussein's intelligence operatives have known Mohamed Atta's former boss for years.

Part of the problem with the media's ignoring of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection via Ansar Al Islam is that they sloppily report Ansar as having been a "Kurdish resistance group in territory beyond Saddam's control." That is baloney.

Ansar was co-headed by one of Saddam's top intelligence generals, a man whose name now escapes me, and the group was used regularly to attack anti-Saddam Kurdish forces. It is highly doubtful that Ansar consisted of Kurds at all. It is likely that they were mostly the foreign fighters who escaped from Afghanistan that you make reference to using the cover of being some sort of Kurdish resistance group to shield themselves from US scrutiny. They were also likely the vanguard force of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement in Iraq headed by Zarqawi.

But this doesn't fit with the pre-conceived story line developed by the MSM on Ansar Al Islam, the same kind of story-line thinking Hayes makes reference to in his piece. The MSM just took in the bull that Ansar Al Islam was an anti-Saddam Kurdish resistance force, despite being headed up by one of Saddam's intelligence generals, and never again bothered to examine what Ansar really was all about. Saddam likely sent his general to keep an eye on Zarqawi who was the co-head of the group and to help direct Ansar's activities.

And if Ansar which was co-lead by Al Zarqawi was an anti-Saddam resistance force, why was he treated in an elite Baghdad hospital reserved for Baathist party officials and then allowed to freely return to Ansar's camps afterwards? Saddam was not known to be this magnanimous to his enemies.

Exactly! In fact, I just got done posting this snip from an article Paul Wolfowitz wrote in 1996 detailing this failure...and its implications on the problem we face today:

"...Perhaps most damaging was the pretense that nothing serious needed to be done to bring the feuding Kurdish factions together. In 1992 Secretary of State James Baker brought the Kurdish factions together as part of an Arab-Kurdish coalition, a coalition that was intact when its representatives met the following year with Vice President Al Gore and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who assured them that the U.S. would protect Iraq's Shiites and Kurds and would make no deals with Saddam.

Yet in 1995, when the Kurdish factions began to show serious divisions, the administration failed to lead. According to press reports, the administration even disowned promises of military support for a successful operation against Iraqi forces (this was further confirmed by the CIA). The most serious mistake was the failure to address the root of the conflict among the factions, their desperate need for resources. The administration never moved to provide an exception from the U.N. sanctions--which were supposed to be aimed at Saddam--for the liberated north of Iraq, which was being strangled far more seriously.

Desperate Kurdish factions began fighting over the limited resources available. And when the democratic Iraqi opposition negotiated a peace agreement between the two main Kurdish factions, the administration couldn't even come up with $4 million for a monitoring force to supervise the accord. Little wonder the Kurdish factions began to look elsewhere for support..."

What's important to note because of Clinton's lack of support, is that some of these Kurdish factions DID look for support from other sources. One of those sources just happened to be Zarqawi and AQ, who began funding a small group of fighters know as Jund al-Islam...who later turned into Ansar al-Islam. The objectives of this group quickly turned from one of supporting an independent Kurdish state to one of becoming an affiliate of Al Qaeda...as Afghan fighters soon began infiltrating the region.

Even Human Rights Watch noted that other Kurds were reporting the influx of foreign fighters, who were raping and razing villages, and assassinating political opponents.

While liberals have often tried to distance Saddam from the Kurds and problems in N. Iraq, he was smack-dab in the middle of it. As one Kurdish commander (Qada) reported, Ansar al-Islam has ties to agents of Saddam Hussein operating in northern Iraq. "We have picked up conversations on our radios between Iraqis and [Ansar] al-Islam."

While Saddam may not have wanted an independent Kurdish state within Iraq, these other Arabs and Kurds had different objectives that interested Saddam. Not only were they doing his bidding by fighting the real Kurdish seperatists, they were a perfect cover for him to continue his war against America. Just the fact that Saddam would've allowed Zarqawi to be treated in a Baghdad hospital...and than released unharmed, to return to Ansar, kind of puts this claim to rest.

Thanks for the information. Here's more from the London Telegraph...

Saddam's agents launch bloodbath against West's allies
By Wendell Steavenson in Halabja
(Filed: 23/12/2002)

Bitter fighting is raging in the mountains of northern Iraq between Islamic militants accused of links to al-Qa'eda and one of the West's key allies in a troubling diversion in the countdown to a possible war with Saddam Hussein.

For more than a year about 600 fighters of Ansar al-Islam have faced a Kurdish peshmerga force of 5,000, from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, lobbing mortar shells at their positions, mounting ambushes and sending terrorist cells into Kurdish cities.

In the past week the fighting has intensified with reports of 100 people on both sides being killed. Some accounts suggested dozens of peshmerga fighters were killed in one battle and that when they tried to take an Ansar al-Islam fighter prisoner he blew himself up.

According to the PUK, one of the two dominant Kurdish political parties, Ansar al-Islam is supplied with weapons and money by the Iraqi Mukhabarat, Saddam's intelligence service, to destabilise the region.

A Mukhabarat agent called Abu Wa-il is said to be among the group. This is confirmed by Abu Iman al-Baghdadi, an ex-Mukhabarat officer now in jail. If true, it means Ansar al-Islam could have a wider global aspect because al-Baghdadi says Saddam sent Abu Wa'il to Afghanistan in 1995 where he formed links with al-Qa'eda.

Al-Baghdadi said he knew this because he was in the bodyguard of Saddam's son-in law at the time and had been in a training camp with some of the agents they sent to Afghanistan.

"Saddam sent agents to Afghanistan to al-Qa'eda," said al Bahgdadi. "But they had their own agenda and orders from Baghdad."

The peshmerga commander of the area, Sheikh Jafar Mustapha, says Ansar al-Islam has killed 130 of his men and 20 local villagers have died in crossfire or by stepping on scattered land mines.

A year ago the peshmerga fighters tried to drive the group out of their mountain strongholds but the Islamists massacred 42 of them by slitting their throats. Mustapha said: "Usually they don't shoot people; they like to use swords and knives.

"When they capture one of our peshmergas they cut him into pieces." The original leader of Ansar al-Islam, Mullah Krekar, is in jail in Holland and the PUK said the group is now led by Abu Abdullah Ashafi, a low-born Kurd who joined the Iraqi army in the 1980s before turning to Islam and spending four years in Afghanistan.

Dug into caves in the mountains, as many as 40 of Ansar al-Islam's fighters are Arabs, Iraqis and others washed up from the Afghan melee.

According to the Kurdish newspaper Hawlati, Ansar al-Islam's leader, Abu Abdallah al-Shafei, was killed in the recent fighting with the PUK but there was no confirmation of the report.

The group's profile seems to be that of a band of itinerant guerillas, fighting their own ideological battles for Islam aided by other groups.

There are some suggestions that Ansar al-Islam, who operate right on the Iranian border, are supplied through Iran, with Iranian complicity.

But in general the Iranian relationship with the Kurdish parties remains cordial - the Iranian-Kurdish border is much more porous than borders with Turkey and Syria and in September they were instrumental in seeing Mullah Krekar caught in Holland.

The old enemies, Iraq and Iran, are on paper strange co-conspirators, but Iran, like Turkey and Syria, remains extremely wary of a strong Kurdish state bordering its own Kurdish populations. The KDP tends to play down PUK's claims that Ansar al-Islam has links to bin Laden.

One senior official of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan or KDP, said: "There are links with al-Qa'eda but I cannot say that Ansar receives orders from al-Qa'eda."

They suspect the connection has been manufactured to encourage American help and involvement. The Americans have conspicuously stayed away.

He said: "I think if the Americans were more convinced of an al-Qa'eda link they would attack them. Possibly the al-Qa'eda link is exaggerated."

A Mukhabarat captain arrested by the KDP for overseeing a sabotage campaign in Erbil that saw several bombs aimed at civilian and UN targets as well as assassination attempts, said the Mukhabarat supplied Ansar al-Islam.

"They co-operated now and then but secretly," he said. "But Ansar does not always carry out the operations the Muk asks them to. Sometimes they take the money and do not deliver."

GW and a few of his trusted cabinet members probably got an very top secret intel dump from a key ally after 9/11 implicating Saddam and other mass murdering Iraqis in both attacks on the WTC.

In relation to that (these were copied a while back; some of the links may no longer be working):

"Israeli intelligence: Iraq financed attacks", 9/12/2001

Iraq recruited Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden and his Islamic allies to carry out the suicide attacks around the United States, according to Israeli intelligence.

Israeli officials and intelligence analysts said the suicide hijackings that downed the World Trade Center and destroyed parts of the Pentagon was too large an operation for any one group. The analysts said the operation was also too big even for a coalition of Islamic terrorists headed by Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden.

"Laurie Mylroie on CBS pointing out possible Iraqi connection to NYC and DC terror attack...", 9/12/2001

"Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey Sees Iraqi Fingerprints", 9/14/2001

Woolsey commended Laurie Mylroie's opinion essay "Bin Laden Isn't Only One to Blame," which appeared in Thursday's editions of the Wall Street Journal, as well as "Getting Serious," the newspaper's accompanying editorial.

"Mossad warned CIA of attacks - report", 9/17/2001

Mossad officials traveled to Washington last month to warn the CIA and the FBI that a cell of up to 200 terrorists was planning a major operation, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph here yesterday.

"An Iraqi Connection?", 9/18/2001

CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart reports the United States has received an intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the hijacker who is named as the pilot of the first plane to strike the World Trade Centers, met early this year somewhere in Europe with the head of the Iraqi intelligence service.

"Gertz: Bin Laden linked with Iraqi agents days before attack", 9/21/2001

Osama bin Laden was in contact with Iraqi government agents from his base in Afghanistan in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to U.S. intelligence officials... Bin Laden's contacts with the Iraqi government were detected before the attacks, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity...

"Pentagon Board Wants Hit on Iraq After Afghanistan, But Secretary of State Powell Fears Strike Could Shatter Arab Anti-Terror Coalition: Rove and Hughes Not Included in Nightly Meeting of Principals", 9/23/2001

At a two-day meeting last week of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by hard-liner Richard Perle, eminent conservatives including Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich reached a consensus that U.S. military forces should strike Iraq shortly after an initial blow against Afghanistan in response to the terror attack on New York and Washington, Newsweek reports in the current issue.

"Tariq Aziz-'We are ready for War' (warns of grave consequences)", 10/18/2001

Iraq said yesterday that it expects to be attacked by America and Britain and warned of the 'grave' consequences if any attempt was made to topple Saddam Hussein from power.

"USA, U.K. TO SHOOT MISSILES ON IRAQ?", 10/28/20001

Novosti correspondents Yuri Zinin and Konstantin Maximov) -- The USA and Great Britain are plotting to hit 300 targets in Iraq with a thousand missiles to overthrow President Saddam Hussain, Iraq's Vice-Premier Tariq Aziz said in an interview the British-based Sunday Telegraph carries today.

"Final US ultimate warning to Iraq", 11/5/2001

The Kuwaiti daily al-Seyash issued on Sunday quoted sources at the British house of commons as saying that the British prime minister Tony Blair asked the Jordanian King Abdullah II during his visit to Amman to convey a final warning from the US administration to Iraq on the need of accepting the return back of the UN inspectors to Baghdad within three weeks, otherwise the next station of the war against terrorism after Afghanistan will be Iraq.

"Russia Would Oppose Attack on Iraq", 12/2/2001

Russia would oppose a U.S. military strike against Iraq and believes diplomacy is the only way to solve the arms inspections impasse between Washington and Baghdad, a Russian envoy visiting the Middle East said Sunday.

"Iraq officially threatens Israel", 12/4/2001

For the first time, Iraq has specifically threatened Israel with retaliation for any U.S.-led campaign against the regime of President Saddam Hussein.

"Blair Warns Saddam", 12/4/2001

British troops could take the war against terrorism to Iraq, the Prime Minister has suggested. Tony Blair refused to rule out British involvement in any military action against Baghdad.

"Attack on Iraq 'Off the Table,' Officials Furious at State Dept. ", 12/5/2001

An impeccable, hall of fame Washington Insider close to the State Department has said that they are furious that an attack on Iraq was 'put off the table.'

The source said that there was not enough unimpeachable evidence to make the war stick with the coalition and that the next target may be Indonesia.

Wolfowitz walked out of the decision meeting absolutely furious, which is interesting becuase it is usually the State Department who have been the 'doves' on this issue recently, but in the last few weeks Colin Powell has drastically changed his position to go after Iraq policy wise in the meetings.

"France won't back U.S. attack on Iraq", 2/22/2002

The French ambassador to the United States says Europe will not support any U.S. military action against Iraq without clear evidence that a military response is warranted.

Etc.

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