A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told US interrogators the meeting never happened, according to US officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter.
Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the US in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations.
US officials caution that Ani may have been lying to US interrogators, but the only other person reported to have attended the meeting was Atta, who died in the crash of his hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.
Reports that an Iraqi spy had met with Atta in Prague first circulated soon after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, but they have been in dispute ever since.
Czech government officials initially confirmed the reports, even as the CIA and the FBI said they could not corroborate them. Conservatives both inside and out of the Bush administration, arguing for war with Iraq, pointed to the reports as evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that planned the Sept. 11 attacks.
Possible contacts between Atta and Ani seemed to offer the clearest potential connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda at a time when the Bush administration was arguing that invading Iraq was part of its campaign against terrorism.
But the CIA and FBI eventually concluded that the meeting probably did not take place, and that there was no hard evidence that Saddam's government was involved in the Sept. 11 plot.
That put the intelligence agencies at odds with hard-liners at the Pentagon and the White House, who came to believe that CIA analysts had ignored evidence that proved links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Eventually, the Prague meeting became a central element in a battle between the CIA and the administration's hawks over prewar intelligence.
Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-ranking al-Qaeda leaders in US custody, told the CIA that bin Laden rejected the idea of working with Saddam, a secular leader whom bin Laden considered corrupt and irredeemable, according to a classified intelligence report from September last year obtained by The New York Times.
Al-Qaeda's leadership "viewed the Iraqis, particularly the military and security services, as corrupt, irreligious and hypocritical in that they succumb to Western vices while concurrently remaining at war with the US," the report says, summarizing Zubaydah's statements.
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
SCIENTIFIC TREASURE: Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples would help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space on Sunday parachuted into the Utah desert to cap a seven-year journey. In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 100,000km out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the ship set off after another asteroid. “We have touchdown,” mission recovery operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — at about 6,100m — basing it on the deceleration rate. To everyone’s relief, the
COP28 AGENDA: Beijing’s climate envoy said that China was open to negotiating a global renewable energy target as long as it took economic conditions into account The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, China’s top climate official said on Thursday, adding that such fuels must continue to play a vital role in maintaining global energy security. Chinese Special Envoy on Climate Change Xie Zhenhua (解振華) was responding to comments by ambassadors at a forum in Beijing ahead of the UN’s COP28 climate meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in November. Reporters obtained a copy of text of Xie’s speech and a video recording of the meeting. Countries are under pressure to make more ambitious climate pledges after a UN-led global “stocktake” said that 20 gigatonnes of additional
The son of jailed Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英) on Wednesday said that he did not want to see his father die in detention, as his lawyers raised the prospect that his long-delayed trial might be pushed back indefinitely. Sebastien Lai (黎崇恩) also said that the British government was “shameful” for its lack of action in helping his father, who is a British national. Jimmy Lai, the 75-year-old founder of Hong Kong’s now-defunct Apple Daily, has been in detention since he was arrested in 2020 under a National Security Law imposed by Beijing. The Hong Kong businessman faces up to life
RSS