Another Detail The 9/11 Commission Seems To Have Missed
By Captain Ed on 9/11 Commission
Captain's Quarters
Arrests corroborated by BBC and Reuters. See Update V.
Germany has long been known as one of the primary logistical areas for the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Atta and several of the 9/11 hijackers spent considerable time in Hamburg especially during the recruitment and research effort in 1999 and 2000 before coming to the United States to begin the actual work of preparing the attacks. The 9/11 report contains 75 references to Germany, most of them involving Atta and his team; a search on Hamburg generates 90 hits. Three of the four pilots came from the Hamburg cell (page 242).
With all of these references to Germany and Hamburg, the 9/11 Commission oddly failed to include a published report from March 2001 in a Parisian Arabic newspaper, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, about the arrest of two suspected Iraqi spies -- based on a tip from the CIA:
Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany 16 March 2001
Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were
arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The
arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was
reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence
service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US
interests around the world through a network of alliances
with extremist fundamentalist parties.
The most serious report contained information that Iraq
and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German
authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi
agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities
in several German cities. German authorities, acting on
CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the
activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They
discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered
what they considered to be serious indications of
cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was
considered so important that a special team of CIA and
FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two
Iraqi spies.
Not one word of this gets addressed in the final Commission report, as far as I can tell. The report contains thirty-one references to arrests, most of them for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Zacarias Moussaoui, but none of them mention any German arrests of Iraqi spies in Germany for March 2001. It isn't as if the 9/11 Commission considered Al-Watan al-Arabi an unreliable source, either; they used it as a reference for an editorial by Saudi Prince Bandar.
The CIA apparently knew something about this; why didn't it come out during the hearings?
This looks like a very strange coincidence, that the Germans found such an extensive Iraqi espionage ring within their borders at the same time that al-Qaeda planned its largest and most complicated attack on Western interests ever. That attack required extraordinary coordination and planning, with a large amount of resourcing. The attacks before and since have all been suicide or hit-and-run affairs, on a much smaller scale and with much more modest ambitions.
This information was published contemporaneously in March 2001 and was in the public domain. If anyone brought it to the Commission's attention, no evidence of it exists in the report. Presumably, such public information would have been addressed in the report even if it turned out to be mistaken had anyone bothered to look at it -- or if the Commission could explain it away in favor of their "no operational connection" analysis between Iraq and 9/11.
In March 2001, the CIA suspected that the Iraqis had allied themselves with Islamist extremists to carry out attacks on American interests, and as a result the Germans discovered exactly that -- right where the planning for 9/11 took place. Did this information get the Able Danger treatment as well? (h/t: CQ reader Tom M.)
Addendum: It's worth noting that syndicated columnist Amir Taheri considered Al-Watan Al-Arabi to be a pro-Saddam weekly.
UPDATE: These arrests don't appear to have made it into Stephen Hayes' book The Connection, either.
UPDATE II: A commenter asks me if I believe that Saddam had an active role in 9/11. Up to this week, I've been fairly satisfied with the "no proven operational connection" determination made by the 9/11 Commission regarding the attacks -- though reading Hayes' book shows us plenty of other efforts by Saddam to reach out to radical Islamists. With an apparent attempt to suppress certain kinds of evidence now coming to light with the Able Danger revelations, though, the entire report and its conclusions no longer hold much credibility. It appears that the Commission's efforts aimed at supporting a preconceived narrative, and that may be the best that can be said of it.
Remembering what analysts said about the attack in the days following 9/11, all of them seem surprised at the sophistication and coordination of the operation. Al-Qaeda had never attempted a mission on that scale before, and it hasn't since then, either. I recall plenty of experts talking for weeks afterward how that kind of well-timed and effective attack required strong logistical support, training, and funding. Perhaps AQ managed to pull that all together once; maybe not. I think we need to take another look at 9/11, starting completely fresh. What we have has massive holes in it, as we have all discovered in the last 72 hours or so.
UPDATE III: Pierre at Pink Flamingo has had this information on his site for almost three years. (Sorry, Pierre, it didn't pop up on Google.)
UPDATE IV: I thought most people knew about Ramzi Yousef and the Iraqi passport. Here's one narrative from Rotten.com:
The first major explosion Ramzi Yousef added to his
resume was significant in a number of ways -- the World
Trade Center.
In late 1992, Yousef entered the country with a fake
Iraqi passport and asked for asylum. His traveling
companion was arrested immediately when a search of his
luggage revealed bomb-making manuals. Because the INS
holding cells were overcrowded, Yousef was released with
instructions to come back a month later for a hearing.
More from Laurie Mylroie:
Several Iraqis hovered around the fringe of the plot.
One, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is the sole remaining indicted
fugitive. Born in the United States while his father was
a graduate student here, Yasin was able to obtain a U.S.
passport in June 1992. Yasin arrived in New York from
Baghdad in September 1992. He returned there shortly
after the Trade Center bombing, transiting through
Jordan, where he stopped at the Iraqi embassy and quickly
(within 24 hours) received a visa for his U.S. passport.
Much later, U.S. authorities found documents in Iraq that
showed Yasin was rewarded with a house and monthly
stipend. Ramzi Yousef was a second key figure in that
attack. Like Yasin, Yousef arrived in New York in early
September 1992. At Kennedy Airport, Yousef presented an
Iraqi passport, with stamps showing that his trip began
in Baghdad. The immigration inspector who processed him
testified that Yousef's passport "appeared to be valid
and unaltered."
And so on; here's the Google search that brings up plenty of references.
google.com
UPDATE V: These arrests have been corroborated by contemporaneous reports from the BBC and Reuters, quoted by Newsmax here.
news.bbc.co.uk
nci.org
newsmax.com
captainsquartersblog.com
meib.org
benadorassociates.com
amazon.com
amazon.com
amazon.com
papadoc.net
papadoc.net
rotten.com
worldandi.com |
