Sorry, there was SO MUCH evidence of the tie between Iraq and Bin Ladan that I couldn't fit it all in one posting.....
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35. Following the Hijazi meetings, Qusay Hussein reportedly dispatched representatives to follow-up with Bin Laden and obtain his firm commitment to exact revenge against the United States for the December 1998 bombing campaign. Iraq reportedly offered Bin Laden and Al Qaeda an open-ended commitment to joint operations against the United States and its “moderate” Arab allies in exchange for an absolute guarantee that Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and their allies would not attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
36. Israeli sources reportedly claim that, for the past two years, Iraqi intelligence officers have been shuttling back and forth between Baghdad and Afghanistan. According to the Israelis, one of these Iraqi intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October by Pakistani officials near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
37. In January 1999, Iraq reportedly began reorganizing and mobilizing intelligence front operations throughout Europe in support of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
38. According to Czech intelligence sources, Mohammad Atta, the operational ringleader of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, met in June 2000 with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, a consul and second secretary at the Iraqi embassy in Prague. Al-Ani is one of Iraqi’s most highly decorated intelligence officers, a special forces veteran, and a senior leader of Iraq’s “M-8” special operations branch. Other reports indicate that Al-Ani may have met with another hijacker, Khalid Almihdar.
39. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross has confirmed that Atta met with al-Ani in early April 2001 in Prague. Atta also reportedly met with the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and the former Iraqi deputy intelligence director, Farouk al-Hijazi, in Prague sometime in early April 2001.
40. Czech intelligence sources further report that Atta and al-Ani embraced upon meeting at Prague’s Ruzyne airport, and that Atta may have visited the Czech capitol on four other occasions.
41. Czech intelligence sources also reported that al-Ani had been under surveillance because he had been observed apparently surveying the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague. Czech authorities believed the site had been selected for attack by terrorists. Later in 2001, al-Ani was expelled from the Czech Republic for espionage activities.
42. Reports of additional intelligence ties between Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and Iraq continue to mount. The CIA reportedly believes Iraq provided falsified passports for the nineteen hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Further, senior U.S. intelligence sources have revealed that, in the Spring of 2001, Marwan al-Shehri and Ziad Jarrah -- two of Atta’s closest associates and members of the Al Qaeda “cell” in the Federal Republic of Germany -- met with known Iraqi intelligence agents outside the United States.
43. Italian security sources have reported that Iraq made use of its embassy in Rome to foster and cultivate Iraq’s partnership with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Habib Faris Abdullah al-Mamouri, a general in the Iraqi secret service, and, from 1982 to 1990, a member of Iraq’s “M-A” special operations branch charged with developing links with Islamist militants in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the states of the Persian Gulf, was stationed in Rome as an “instructor” for Iraqi diplomats. Al-Mamouri reportedly met with Mohammed Atta in Rome, Hamburg, and Prague. Al-Mamouri has not been seen in Rome since July 2001, shortly after he last met with Atta.
44. Recent Iraqi defectors provide additional details of Iraq’s support for international terrorism throughout the 1990s. The Public Broadcasting Service documentary program entitled “Frontline” interviewed former Iraqi intelligence and army officers with first-hand accounts of highly secret installations run by an international terrorist known to Iraqi staffers only as “the Ghost.” “The Ghost” is reported to be Abdel Hussein, the chief trainer at a training camp inside Iraq, which includes the fuselage of a Boeing 707 jetliner that is used to practice hijacking scenarios. U.N. inspectors independently confirmed the existence of this particular training camp inside Iraq.
45. The Iraqi defector known as “Saddam’s Bomb-maker,” Dr. Khidhir Hamza, who served as Iraq’s Director of Nuclear Weaponization, analyzes Iraqi’s sponsorship of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as follows:
What I think is there is somehow a change in the level of the type of operation Bin Laden has been carrying [out]. What we are looking at initially is more or less just attempts to blow some buildings, just normal use of explosives for a terrorist. What we have in the September 11 operation, [is a] tightly controlled, very sophisticated operation; the type an Iraqi intelligence agency, well versed in the technology [could pull off]. ... So my thinking is a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan is not the guy who will do an operation of this caliber. It has to have in combination with it a guy with the sophistication and know-how on how to carry these things.
. . . Iraq [also] has a history of training terrorists, harboring them, and taking good care of them, by the way. A terrorist is well cared for with Saddam. So he has a good reputation in that type of community, if you like.
46. Several leading authorities on Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda concur on the likelihood of Iraq’s sponsorship and coordination of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The former head of Israel’s Mossad secret service, Rafi Eitan, and former CIA Director James Woolsey, share the view that Iraq, Bin Laden and Al Qaeda conspired in the attacks. Their views also are shared by Laurie Mylroie, an academic and Iraqi affairs expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.. Mylroie cites the role of Iraqi operatives in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to support her claim that the September 11, 2001 attacks are a matter of unfinished business for Iraq, which considers itself to be at war with the United States.
