MORE NONSENSE FROM CHENEY
I can’t believe after all this time, Dick Cheney is still trotting out this 9/11-Iraq conspiracy crap about Mohamed Atta and the meeting in Prague, and alleged tough guy Tim Russert is letting him get away with it unchallenged.
Here’s what Cheney said yesterday: “With respect to 9/11, of course, we’ve had the story that’s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we’ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”
Tim changed the subject. Here’s what I would have said: “Sir, with all due respect, that claim is based on the claim of a single uncorroborated informant to Czech intelligence. President Havel informed President Bush that the meeting had almost certainly not taken place. Moreover, when the high-level al-Qaida leader, Abu Zubaydah, was finally captured in March 2002 in Pakistan, he informed his captors, according to a New York Times report, that bin Laden had personally rejected the idea of any kind of alliance with Saddam Hussein. Zubaydah’s explanation was later corroborated by testimony from high-level al-Qaida agents captured later in the spring, including one of the key planners of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Farouk Hijazi, a former Iraqi intelligence operative who U.S. officials allege met with al-Qaida operatives and perhaps bin Laden himself in the 1990s, also has denied any Iraq-al-Qaida ties, according to U.S. officials. Meanwhile, U.S. military forces also captured Samir al-Ani, the very man in question, in July, with no word on any meeting. Do you have any new evidence, Secretary Cheney, or are you simply trying to perpetrate yet another lie on top of all those already perpetrated since you and President Bush planned this ruinous war? ”
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