Summary

In July 2001, Mohammed Atta set the date for the 9-11 attacks. Almost within hours, the CIA received a warning about the attacks and when they would occur from an Iranian intelligence agent. Simultaneously, an official Saddam newspaper described the upcoming attacks in detail. If what follows below is at it seems, the conclusions are disturbing. It seems that no less than the Iranian and Iraqi governments and Able Danger knew what was going on. The 9-11 Commission apparently continues to be somewhat in the dark, however.

Discussion

Captain Ed reminds us that, according to Kenneth Timmerman, the CIA had been warned in July 2001 about the upcoming attacks. “On July 26, 2001, an Iranian intelligence agent [Mr. Zakeri] walked into the American embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and asked to see the CIA chief:”

There’s going to be a big attack on America on the twentieth of Shahrivar, Zakeri insisted. That’s the date my boss told us to be ready. Six people who have been trained as pilots have just left Iran. George consulted a calendar that gave the corresponding Western dates. So we’re talking about September 10, right? I’ll mark my date book, he added sarcastically. He paid Zakeri a few hundred dollars for his time and sent him away.

Ed further notes the prediction by a Saddam newspaper on July 21, 2001 that the 9-11 attacks would take place. This from a WSJ report in Feb 03:

[A] July 21, 2001, commentary in the Iraqi publication Al-Nasiriya praised bin Laden: “In this man’s heart you’ll find an insistence, a strange determination that he will reach one day the tunnels of the White House and will bomb it with everything that is in it.” The article recounts bin Laden’s attacks on U.S. targets and U.S. efforts “to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them bin Laden, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.” The commentary is ominously prescient, especially since it could never have appeared without official sanction.

“Bin Laden is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit,” it continues, speaking about his goal to “drive off the Marines” from Arabia. Most eerily of all, the writer adds that those Marines “will be going away because the revolutionary bin Laden is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the man . . . will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs.” Is that a reference to Sinatra’s “New York, New York”? Did Saddam know what would happen two months later?

Ed asks:

Let’s take another look at the timeline to see where July 21, 2001 fits into it. At that point, Mohammed Atta has just met with Ramzi Binalshibh in Madrid, discussing the need to set a date for the attacks. Binalshibh claims that Atta did not do so at that meeting, but Binalshibh provides the only evidence of Atta’s demurral. Five days later, Hamid Zakeri would walk into an American embassy and tell the CIA that Osama bin Laden would launch a massive attack the US on September 11, and that the attack would involve six pilots — an attack about which he learned through his Iranian contacts.

Conclusion

The 9-11 Commission would perhaps have done a better job if Ed Morrissey had been sitting in the seat occupied by Jamie Gorelick.

UPDATE

Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard gives perhaps a rationale for such elisions and omissions:

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?

The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn’t fit the commission’s narrative.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 7:58 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Religion, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.