Congress Should Investigate The Neoconspiracy

Probably nothing has made

neoconservative chicken hawks flap and crow quite
like the conclusion announced last week by the Sept 11
Commission that it could establish no "collaborative
relationship" between Al Qaeda and the regime of
Saddam Hussein.

For the next several days the Bush
administration (including the president himself) and its
water-fetchers in the media insisted the Commission
didn`t know what it was talking about. [Commission
Staff Statement

PDF] I guess if you say it three times, it`s true.

But no matter how many times the
armchair warriors claim Saddam and Al Qaeda were in
cahoots, there remains no evidence to establish that,
let alone that Saddam knew about or was involved in the

attacks of 9/11.

There were, as both the
administration and the Commission seem to agree, some
"links" or "connections" or "contacts"
between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but no substantive support of
the terrorists by Baghdad and in particular no
participation in

Al Qaeda`s attacks against U.S. targets.

As for the "links," "contacts,"
etc., of course they existed. The Baghdad government
would have been nuts not to stay in touch with the
terrorists, not only to see what they were up to as much
as it could but also to make sure the mad mullahs in
Osama bin Laden`s stable didn`t decide to turn the wrath
of Allah against the less than pious Saddam himself.

Governments, good ones or bad ones,
often maintain what are called "back channel"
contacts with unsavory elements—terrorists, spies,
criminals, even neoconservatives.

It`s true the administration never
actually claimed that Iraq was involved in the 9/11
attacks, but some spokesmen rather encouraged people to
think so.

Even more than the administration
itself, its chicken-hawk allies in the neocon media
pushed this claim for all it was worth—which turns out
to be not very much.

Back before snoopy commissions
started poking into what actually happened,
neoconservative pundits jabbered constantly about the
murky ties between Iraq and 9/11. The pièce de
résistance was the supposed meeting between

Mohammed Atta, who masterminded the attacks, and an
Iraqi diplomat in Prague on April 9, 2001.

Neoconservative columnist William
Safire was the first to

claim this meeting showed a connection of Iraq with
9/11, and even after published news stories showed it
never happened, Fred Barnes, executive editor of the
Weekly Standard,

insisted that the Czech ambassador assured him it
did take place. [Mohamed Atta Was Here, Fred
Barnes Weekly Standard August 6, 2003]

The evidence for the meeting is a
videotape of the Iraqi diplomat in Prague walking and
talking with an unidentified man said to be Atta.

There`s no doubt the diplomat did
meet with somebody. There are two questions: Was it Atta,
and if so, what did they talk about?

Mr. Barnes did not hesitate to leap
to the conclusion that the meeting proved that Iraq was
in on the 9/11 attacks. "The meeting has political
and international importance," he puffed. "A
connection between Iraq and Atta, an al Qaeda operative
under Osama bin Laden, bolsters the case for military
action by the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein
regime in Iraq."

Well, yes, that was the whole
point, wasn`t it, and it`s the reason the chicken hawks
are so infuriated that the Sept. 11 Commission can`t
find any "collaborative relationship" at all
between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

As for the famous Atta chat with
the Iraqi diplomat, the Commission has now shown that it
almost certainly did not take place at all. Atta is
known to have withdrawn money from his Virginia bank
account on April 4, five days before the meeting, and
calls are known to have been made from his cell phone on
April 6, 9, 10, and 11—from Florida, not Prague. [No
Evidence of Meeting With Iraqi  By James
Risen, NYT June 17, 2004]

Either Atta left his cell phone
with someone else (most dubious—no self-respecting
terrorist would

let his cell phone out of his possession; it`s like
letting somebody else use your toothbrush) or was able
to bilocate magically from Florida to Prague.

Or—as unthinkable as it may be to
some people—Atta never met with the Iraqi at all.

The non-meeting has even more
"political and international importance" than a real
meeting, because the non-meeting means the whole case
for the Al Qaeda-Saddam link collapses, as does the
chicken hawk-administration case for "military action
by the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein
regime."

The really fascinating question
about the whole Iraq war is one the Commission has not
explored and probably won`t: Just exactly how many lies
did the

Neoconservatives who engineered the war concoct?

We have known for more than a year
now that the "weapons of mass destruction" claims
were fake.

Now we know the same about Al Qaeda
and its "links" with Iraq.

There are several other whoppers
they also fabricated.

Somebody really ought to
investigate.

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[Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,

America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.
Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click

here to orderhis monograph,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future and
here for
Glynn Custred`s review.]