THE FINAL REPORT from the 9/11 Commission is scheduled to be released this Thursday. It will be a dense thicket of chronology, narrative, analysis, and proposals for reform. But one issue is likely to be prominent in the news coverage. In fact, it already has been. “9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss Iraq-Qaeda Alliance.” That was the headline over a July 12 New York Times report.
We hope the Times is mistaken. It doesn’t have a great track record on the issue, insisting (erroneously) that the commission’s staff statement last month found “No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.” The vague language of the staff statement lent itself to misreporting. Most problematic was its declaration that repeated contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda “do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.”
Almost immediately, the commission’s co-chairmen qualified that finding. When the Times and others claimed that the staff statement “sharply contradicted” claims of a connection from the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney, Democratic co-chairman Lee Hamilton strongly objected:
That qualification–“with regard to the attacks on the United States”–is crucial. The Bush administration has never claimed Iraq was behind the attacks on September 11. In fact, when that question was put to President Bush by reporters from Newsweek six weeks before the Iraq war, his answer was direct: “I cannot make that claim.”
What the Bush administration did say–and what so many reporters seem to have trouble understanding–is that Iraq and al Qaeda had a relationship that, by its very existence, posed a potential threat to the United States. (According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report released on July 9, the CIA counterterrorism center concurred: “Any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.”)
Was it a “collaborative relationship”? Former CIA director George Tenet testified on several occasions that intelligence from “sources of varying reliability” indicated that Iraq provided safe haven and training to al Qaeda. If he’s right, that’s collaboration. But it’s not just George Tenet. An internal Iraqi intelligence document recovered in postwar Iraq referred to Iraq-al Qaeda ties as a “relationship.” The New York Times first disclosed the existence of that document–authenticated by several U.S. government intelligence units–one week after the 9/11 Commission’s staff statement. The document states that “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement” and that when bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, Iraqi intelligence sought “other channels through which to handle the relationship.”
Let us be clear: Neither we nor the Bush administration ever suggested that Saddam Hussein directed or had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. The CIA assessment that al Qaeda was capable of conducting those attacks without the active assistance of a state sponsor is quite persuasive. Still, there are two Iraq-related issues that deserve further explanation from the 9/11 Commission: hijacker Mohammed Atta’s alleged meetings with Iraqi intelligence in Prague, and the al Qaeda-related activities of Iraqi Ahmed Hikmat Shakir.
Staff Statement 16, released last month, expressed doubts that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague in April 2001. Those doubts may be reasonable, but the evidence presented in that statement is hardly conclusive–interviews with intelligence officials (no details of the interviews are provided) and cell phone records that may or may not place Atta in the United States. Remarkably, the Staff Statement made no mention of Atta’s unusual trips to Prague in the spring of 2000, trips he made en route to the United States. An unclassified CIA document released last week by Senator Carl Levin reports that “according to detainee reporting [Atta] departed to the United States from Prague because he thought a non-E.U. member country would be less likely to keep meticulous travel data.” Perhaps. But Atta probably created a more elaborate paper trail, including a German visa, by going out of his way to travel from Germany to Prague twice in a matter of days before coming to the United States. (And if Atta were concerned about traveling to E.U. countries, he apparently got over that by July, when he made a round-trip flight from the United States to Spain.) We look forward to a more comprehensive treatment of this in the Commission’s final report this week.
The other potential Iraqi connection to September 11 concerns Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s July 9 report, Shakir is an Iraqi national
This chronology alone is stunning: A man who received his job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy–a former intelligence officer by one reckoning–facilitates the arrival of a September 11 hijacker for one of the key planning meetings before those attacks.
And there is more to the story, as previously reported in these pages by Stephen F. Hayes. According to several government sources familiar with the intelligence, Shakir’s schedule was controlled by the Iraqi embassy contact. Shakir was detained twice after the September 11 attacks, first in Qatar–where authorities found contact information for several high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists in his possession–and later in Jordan. Saddam Hussein’s government demanded Shakir’s release.
Was the CIA’s assessment in Iraqi Support for Terrorism the right one? It may be that the “circumstances surrounding the hiring of Shakir for this position did not suggest it was done on behalf of the IIS.” What were those circumstances? Hayes has reported that analysts at the CIA were skeptical of an Iraqi intelligence connection because al-Mudaris, Shakir’s embassy contact, was a relatively low-ranking embassy official, and the CIAbelieved this not to be the usual profile of an Iraqi intelligence operative working under diplomatic cover. But how much weight should one give this assumption by the CIA?
In any case, the CIA itself–according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report–has prudently shown “reluctance to draw a conclusion with regard to Shakir.” The 9/11 Commission, as yet, has also not drawn any conclusions regarding Shakir. That’s because, other than one brief public allusion by Commissioner John Lehman, the 9/11 Commission has never mentioned Shakir. Certainly that oversight deserves to be remedied in its final report. What is the explanation for this apparent connection between Iraqi intelligence and a 9/11 planning meeting?
—William Kristol
