Al-Qaeda - Iraqi Connections Documented for a Decade?

Including September Eleventh?

In the latest Vanity Fair, as indicated on MSNBC's Hardball, Tuesday.

Chris Matthews interviewed David Rose, contributing editor for Vanity Fair, about an article he wrote in the latest issue:

.... [ROSE:] Now, I don’t think there was any country in the world that was more intensely spied upon than Iraq in the 1990s. And it’s quite clear from this new analysis, which is being done of the CIA’s own reports, the material which the CIA has produced and graded as belonging to its most reliable counterintelligence, it’s quite clear from that material that the CIA knew of quite a large number of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda going back 10 years, nearly 100.

Now, as one agency — as one, I’m sorry, administration official told me in reporting this article, in the Cold War, people made very important policy decisions on the basis of four or five intelligence reports. Here we have nearly 100 and yet it seems to be new that there’s actually all this evidence of an Iraq/al Qaeda connection.

So you have to ask why. Well I think it’s because for many years the CIA and indeed the State Department have been laboring under the completely mistaken belief that the so-called secular dictator, Saddam Hussein, would not get into bed with an Islamist fundamentalist group, i.e. al Qaeda....

MATTHEWS: Did he tell you of any Iraqi involvement in 9/11?

ROSE: This individual told me in October of last year that the CIA had reports that two of the 9/11 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah traveled to United Arab Emirates...

MATTHEWS: Right.

ROSE: ... in the months before the 9/11 attacks and met with nine Iraqi intelligence officers. Now he told me that way back, more than 13 months ago, and I have been back to this individual, I would say at least half a dozen times since then, and I said have — do you stand by what you say then — what you said to me then and...

MATTHEWS: Right.

ROSE: ... he’s confirmed that he does....

This is going to be front-page news on the supposed nation's newspaper of record soon — right?

(Thanks Bryan.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 12/06/02 09:25:46 AM
Categorized as Political.