Good find! And think about this in relation to what we have seen of the 9/11 O-mission's work, ABLE DANGER, Gorelick's 'wall', failures of intel agencies to work together and share vital information, etc. etc.:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/596 Iraq Connected to 9-11
I think Americans can rightfully feel like they have been lied to or duped by politicians in Washington trying to cover for the Clinton Administration. One thing the Able Danger issue did cause was a re-examination of events that could be gleaned by bloggers from public records and news items. Then the non-MSM journalists jumped in with their resources and access to sources and the story now coming out is of massive amounts of overlooked or surpressed information. Able Danger was one area, and now I am beginning to think its efforts were surpressed, on the surface, because of legal reasons. But this was a cover for the real issue at the time - connections to Iraq.
Why? How did I get to that leap in logic? Well part of this comes from the great work Ed Morrissey did in finding out that Germany arrested two Iraqi operatives trying to recruit people to attack the US, people specifically associated with radical muslim fanatic groups. Groups like Al Qaeda. This is nothing to ignore and is a fact. And my guess is this is the tip of the ice berg compared to what is known in the intelligence community.
Now Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard has an article out with further connections the 9-11 Commission ommitted from its report.
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.
Clinton did not want any confrontations with Iraq in his last year in office. He was too concerned with getting Al Gore elected and his reputation salvaged. He took a gamble and lost. When Able Danger broke I immediately connected Sandy Bergler’s actions with the purloined documents to the Able Danger cover up. Intuition tells me this is probably true - logic says there is nothing in the Able Danger material, as we understand it today, to really harm the Clintonistas and be worth taking this kind of risk. So what if Atta was in the US and not taken seriously. That is the story line now anyway. It just added another example of the same problem we knew about.
But if the notes on the documents clearly showed some indications that Iraq was successfully reaching out and participating with Al Qaeda to attack us - then democrats would know that their chances of winning a presidential election and majorities in congress would be lost for decades.
Is avoiding that kind of fate worth the risk of jail time? Is that the bad decision Bergler felt so anxious over, probably with pressure from Clinton and the rest of his team, that he stole classified material from the national archives and destroyed it?
Yes, that is something that could push some politicians to break the law and risk all. Being relegated to political limbo for years would scare enough people to act irrationally.
Stephen Hayes sees the possible link, as do many of us now.
And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center?
The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn’t fit the commission’s narrative.
Now the question is, what lengths would some people go to supress that link?
Posted by AJStrata on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 9:21 am.
Per Monsoor Ijaz, Susan Rice was instrumental in not taking Sudan up on the offer of Bin Laden. Somehow, seeing her position in the NSC relating to Africa, Joe Wilson's name popped into my head. So I did some more research and...guess what? I just found an interesting tidbit of trivia...
May 13, 1992 - National Security Advisor Samuel R. Berger announced today the appointment of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council. He will succeed Susan Rice.Source.
The Bush Library link at that website is broken, I will see if I can find the info from another source. IMHO, all Kerry advisors during the campaign...Berger, Wilson, Rice and Clarke were all doing CYA to cover each other's mistakes, to hide pertinent info from the Commission and to keep the Iraq/AQ info from going public.