More Misdirection from the MSM on the 9/11 Iraq/al Qaeda Connection

Courtesy of One Who Knows, Andrew McCarthy:

Predictably, many Iraq/Qaeda naysayers are responding to my post-Bush-Iraq-speech piece by citing 9/11 Commission conventional wisdom: that the commission found there was no connection between Saddam's regime and the terror network. There will be more to say in the coming week about that misimpression, and about the commission's back-of-the-hand treatment of Iraq/Qaeda ties.

For now, let's deal with a single point which has been brought up by several readers: The Iraqi intelligence operative who has been referred to as Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the infamous January 2000 meeting in Malaysia that kicked off the 9/11 plot (and perhaps furthered the then-ongoing conspiracy to bomb a U.S. naval vessel which succeeded with the Cole bombing ten months later).

The man's full name has been reported as Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, which is significant for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

Typical is the following from one of my correspondents:

You may want to read the 9/11 Commission report in order to clear up some misconceptions that you promoted in your article, "Its All about 9/11"

The 9/11 Commission found no operational link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and no evidence of any involvement on the part of Iraq in the 9/11 attacks

You mentioned "Ahmed Hikmat Shakir"

He's mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. According to the CIA , the Iraqi Intelligence Agent and the man at the Kuala Lampur terrorist summit were not the same man.

Its sad to see such a strongly worded article based on misinformation


(Lack of punctuation in original.) This is a misreading of the commission's final report, albeit an entirely understandable one given the studied denseness of what the commission said about Shakir. The relevant passage is Footnote 49 (of Chapter 6) on page 502:

... [Hijacker Khalid al-]Mihdhar was met at the Kuala Lumpur airport by Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national. Reports that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi Fedayeen have turned out to be incorrect. They were based on a confusion of Shakir's identity with that of an Iraqi Fedayeen colonel with a similar name, who was later (in September 2001) in Iraq at the same time Shakir was in police custody in Qatar. See CIA briefing by CTC specialists (June 22, 2004); Walter Pincus and Dan Eggen, "Al Qaeda Link to Iraq May Be Confusion over Names," Washington Post, June 22, 2004, p.A13.

This is shameful misdirection. If I were a cynic, I might speculate that the commission had a guilty conscience about Shakir. The staff report it put out a month before the final report, which was embarrassingly shoddy regarding Iraq/Qaeda ties, failed even to mention this critical person. The commission was roundly criticized for this here and elsewhere. Did the final report set about to degrade the importance of this glaring omission rather than to get to the bottom of Shakir's participation in the 9/11 plot by suggesting that Shakir was not that significant a person after all? You be the judge.