Posted on 10/21/2002 9:33:45 AM PDT by Zviadist
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- Czech intelligence officials have knocked down one of the few clear links between al Qaida terrorists and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, UPI has learned.
Senior Czech intelligence officials have told their American counterparts that they now have "no confidence" in their earlier report of direct meetings in Prague between Mohammed Atta, leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers and an Iraqi diplomat stationed in Prague who has since been expelled for "activities inconsistent with his diplomatic status."
"Quite simply, we think the source for this story may have invented the meeting that he reported. We can find no corroborative evidence for the meeting and the source has real credibility problems " a high-ranking source close to Czech intelligence told UPI Sunday.
The initial report of the meeting in June 2000 claimed that Atta had met Ahmad al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official based in Prague under diplomatic cover, whose movements were being routinely monitored by BIS, the Czech intelligence service. The report also suggested that the Iraqi was probably the source of $100,000 that Atta suddenly obtained to finance the U.S. leg of the terror mission.
The report went on to claim that Atta returned to Prague on April 9 last year on a three-day mission to see al-Ani once more, just two weeks before the majority of the hijack team left Saudi Arabia for the United States. The report was then publicly confirmed by Czech Interior Minister Stanislas Gross, on the basis of the initial assessment of the BIS.
The nearest to a smoking gun connecting Iraq to al Qaida, the Czech report was taken very seriously in Washington, in the face of growing skepticism at the Central Intelligence Agency.
But other influential figures in Washington, including former CIA Director James Woolsey and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle pursued their own inquiries using their own sources, and have now also been told by high-ranking Czech sources that they no longer stand by the initial report. Perle, in Prague this weekend for a meeting of the Trilateral Commission, was told in person Sunday that the BIS now doubts that any such meeting between Atta and al-Ani in fact took place.
The question of the Czech meeting, and whether it ever happened, is just one aspect of a growing dispute within the George W. Bush administration, with officials close to the White House leaping to conclusions while the CIA remains skeptical. There is a separate argument over Iraq's attempt to smuggle a consignment of specialized aluminium tubes, cited by President Bush as a sign that Iraq was building a gas centrifuge systém to create weapons-grade uranium.
CIA experts doubt whether the tubes in question were suitable for the supposed task, and believe they were intended instead for use in missile engines, still a clear violation of Iraqi commitments to the United Nations, but not necessarily proof of nuclear intent.
"One of the most dangerous things in this business is to start believing a report simply because it fits with your preconceptions and confirms what you always wanted to believe," a Czech intelligence source told UPI.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
As I have said here in the past, this report was the result of political and inter-agency rivalry in Czech Republic. But so many people here believe what they want to hear and ignore important facts. So...as with the Alger Hiss case, I hope we can finally put this particular lie to rest -- and with it the main "link" between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
UPI is showing it's leanings.
UPI is owned by The Washington Times, which has been most consistently PRO-war with Iraq. Your attack the messenger response only underscores your ignorance of the topic.
Even Helen Thomas quit because of the smell!
Who cares about this? Some people think that only nations directly involved in the 9/11 attacks should be a target. I disagree, and the North Korea fiasco shows the severe limits of engagement, appeasement and inspections. If Jimmy Carter's Nobel Prize was meant as a slap in the face to Bush, then subsequent events in North Korea just bitch-slapped them right back.
So...you are attacking the one consistently conservative major daily newspaper in the United States. Odd. This is a conservative website.
Even Helen Thomas quit because of the smell!
Helen Thomas is a rabid pro-Arabist. She is also of Arab background. So...as you were saying?
Could it be political?
Because goof-balls like you still insist the "Prague meeting" is a causus belli to attack Iraq, and that -- shocking as it may seem -- the news media in a free society is supposed to get at the truth no matter how long it takes. But that matters little when all you want to see is propaganda promoting your cause. Just like the Soviet press.
No one unfamiliar with internal Czech political struggles understands this story in its proper context. I would fit Gertz and Scarborough well into that category.
Yah, and who was it that gave Hitlerly a headline to hold up for all to see stating that "Bush Knew". (Another so called conservative rag)
You posted this because it fits your position and not because it is remotely true. I rest my case.
Bush tough talk backfired on N.Korea
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- The North Koreans have taken a page out of Israel's deterrence playbook. And like Israel, they did so because they were scared.
North Korean officials have made the bombshell admission to U.S. diplomats that their country for years has continued a nuclear development program in secret, even though this was in clear contravention of its 1994 commitments to the United States, U.S. and South Korean officials told UPI early Thursday.
Why did they make such an admission at all? And above all, why did they make it now?
The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is probably the most inaccessible capital city on earth. But certain things are known for a certainty, and very clear inferences can indeed be drawn from them.
First, senior South Korean intelligence officials and close advisers to President Kim Dae-jung have repeatedly told UPI Analysis that North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and his innermost circle are truly ignorant of the nature of democratic societies in the wider world. Even worse, these top South Korean officials say, the North's Kim and his advisers are also still in a very much of a state of paranoid fear about everyone outside their own tightly policed borders.
That is why the South's President Kim made his "Sunshine" policy of very cautious détente with the North the center-piece of his nation's national security policies. And it is also why the South's Kim and his own top officials were so appalled at what they considered the reckless actions and rhetoric of President George W. Bush when he visited the Demilitarized Zone border between South and North. They feared Bush's tough talk could wreck the fragile foundations of their own détente.
The North's leaders, however, do watch the outside world. And it was certainly not lost upon them when Bush, in his State of the Union Address at the beginning of this year, included their country along with Iraq and Iran in an "axis of evil." Now they see Bush is on the brink of going to war with Iraq to topple its longtime leader, President Saddam Hussein.
Mighty Iran has a population of 80 million, four times that of either Iraq or North Korea. But North Korea has the same population, a smaller area and a far, far smaller resource base than Iraq. Also, where Iraq can at least hope for uprisings of popular support among the Middle East's remaining 260 million Arabs outside its borders, or in the wider Muslim world, which numbers around one billion, the North Koreans are out on their own.
Their only supporter is neighboring China. It is determined to keep the North intact as a protective buffer against the contagion of the free speech, democratic societies of South Korea and Japan.
But while China has been making long-term, serious and massive military investment to prepare for a possible air-sea war against the United States in the Taiwan Straits, it is no position to actively militarily intervene, on the North's side against the far superior U.S. high-tech military forces.
Besides the North's revered, although catastrophic, founding ideology of chu-chi, or independent self-reliance, teaches that national security and even survival can be entrusted to no other nation's hands.
The clear strategic inference to be drawn from such premises is that a nuclear deterrent would be necessary to maintain the cherished independence of the North against an outside world presumed to be entirely hostile against it. Similar motivations based on all too real recent history motivated democratic Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion to launch an ambitious nuclear development program in the 1950s.
Ever since then, Israel has been coy about its nuclear weapons capability, generally believed to amount to no less than 200 to 300 nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to carry them. Up to now, the North Koreans have been even more coy, denying they even had any nuclear program beyond what they had admitted to for civilian power-generating purposes.
Going public now is clearly a risk. There is a danger that the South may break off its "Sunshine" relationship with the North and that Japan may beak off its own budding dialogue with Pyongyang.
However, both these developments appear unlikely. President Kim in Seoul and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Tokyo both have far too much political capital invested in dialogue and détente with the North to break it off now. Besides, these policies have proven very popular with their electorates.
The main risk of the North Korean admission lies, as Pyongyang leaders well know, in what Bush's reaction in Washington will be. They may be giving him a justification to turn the heat up on them after he has finished with Saddam.
However, it appears that North Korean leaders have, rather, made the calculation that only the fear that they already possess nuclear weapons will deter Bush from taking major military action against them at some point soon.
Indeed, they may well already be convinced that Bush has already made up his mind to launch U.S. armed forces against them after Iraq is conquered. If that is the case, it would follow that only indicating obliquely but still clearly that they may already possess a nuclear deterrent will be sufficient to keep Bush off their backs.
For more than a decade Pentagon nuclear strategists have had a name for this kind of calculation. They call it "nuclear bee-sting" theory. It means that Third World or "rogue state" leaders believe the threat of having a single nuclear weapon that could destroy an American city or of kill tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in the field would be sufficient to deter any major U.S. military action against them.
Right after the 1991 Gulf War, when India's then-chief of staff was asked privately by some American interlocutors what strategic lessons should be drawn from the rapid and overwhelming U.S. victory, he replied, "Make sure you have your own atomic bomb before you challenge the United States."
And one of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's top national security advisers said, "This is not fantasy. Nuclear bee-sting theory is very real. The Americans are treating it this way. And so are we."
With their announcement Wednesday, the North Koreans appear to be adopting "nuclear bee-sting" theory as their deterrent strategy as well. In poker-playing terms, it is unlikely to be a bluff.
The adinistration has never used this meeting as fodder for war. It is a media driven story, true or not.
While there are plenty of reasons to believe a meeting took place, it is not on the list.
Yeah, he could have gone in and taken them out before they got nukes. Oops, you think that's warmongering.
And here we are. So he is above criticism when he does something stupid? Who made him king?
Yeah, and people with your kind of mindset were all over Reagan and his evil empire routine. Guess what? Reagan was correct. Noodle-spined types don't realize that it takes cajones to deal with these kind of issues, not kumbaya feel-good idiocy of the type promoted by the Clintons and Carters of the world.
Uh....at least he could have stopped supplying them with nuclear technology under Clinton's absurd agreement. He didn't even do that. You are defending the indefensible, but you are so blinded by your obedience to ONE MAN, to ONE PARTY, that you are unable to even carry on rational conversation.
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