Laurie Mylroie writes in today's Front Page that the Czechs have further confirmation of contacts between the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS) and Mohammed Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 plot that killed 3,000 Americans and launched the war on terror:

Important new information has come from Edward Jay Epstein about Mohammed Atta’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence. The Czechs have long maintained that Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers in the United States, met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official, posted to the Iraqi embassy in Prague. As Epstein now reports, Czech authorities have discovered that al-Ani’s appointment calendar shows a scheduled meeting on April 8, 2001 with a "Hamburg student."

That is exactly what the Czechs had been saying since shortly after 9/11: Atta, a long-time student at Germany’s Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, met with al-Ani on April 8, 2001. Indeed, when Atta earlier applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic, he identified himself as a “Hamburg student.” The discovery of the notation in al-Ani’s appointment calendar about a meeting with a “Hamburg student” provides critical corroboration of the Czech claim.

Epstein also explains how Atta could have traveled to Prague at that time without the Czechs having a record of such a trip. Spanish intelligence has found evidence that two Algerians provided Atta a false passport.

Mylroie reports that the Czechs had tumbled to an Iraqi plot to bomb Radio Free Iraq, based out of Prague, and had been following the Iraqi attaché al-Ani. On April 8, their counterintelligence service noted al-Ani meeting with a "student from Hamburg" who, they had heard, was potentially dangerous. Based on that meeting and because al-Ani refused to explain the meeting, the Czechs promptly booted al-Ani from the country. But the damage was apparently done.

Even before this further substantiation, Epstein's compelling evidence has been largely ignored by the press, as even Ted Kennedy continues to bloviate about how Saddam had no connection to terror. (I'd say planning the bombing of Radio Free Iraq puts that notion to rest.) Why? Mylroie contends that the knowledge that Saddam helped out with 9/11 will shift the spotlight onto the two administrations that allowed Saddam to fester in Iraq: George H. W. Bush and especially Bill Clinton.

I would add a second line of thought to her argument: the media also would suffer a tremendous loss of credibility. Editors from around the nation have scoffed at the continuing suspicion of Iraqi involvement in 9/11, going as far as to use the prevailing wisdom of non-involvement to prove that conservatives are stupid. Any evidence that conservatives perhaps were not so stupid after all will not make headlines in this media environment, nor will anything that appears to justify the war.

Mylroie mentions in her summation that the US has hard evidence, found through the inspection of Iraqi documentation captured at the collapse of the regime, of Iraqi complicity in 9/11. If this is true, the US and UK should act quickly to declassify this data, substantiate it, and make it public. Perhaps the data won't convince everyone, but we all need to review it in order to make that decision ourselves.

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» A Bush Hole Card? from Demosophia
Ed Morrisey posted awhile back about some new information uncovered by the intrepid Jay Epstein concerning the Iraq/Qaeda connection. Ed's post refers to an article by Laurie Mylroie on Frontpage, which in turn refers to an Epstein piece on the [Read More]

Tracked on May 11, 2004 6:55 PM