"Atta who is in Prague". How did the lie of the link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda work?

The Egyptian student "Mohamed Atta" spent many years in the German city of Hamburg during his study of urban planning there in the nineties of the last century, and Hamburg was not only his place of residence and study, but also a base from which he moved comfortably in the midst of his embrace of "jihadist thought" and his communication with Al-Qaeda, which finally led him to implement his goal by boarding one of the planes on the eleventh of September, kidnapping it and then forcing it to crash into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, USA.

From Hamburg in the far north of Germany, Atta traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan more than once, and his relationship with the organization and its men strengthened, and from there he also traveled to the United States at the turn of the millennium about a year before the September attacks.

Atta in Prague. The flimsy thread between al-Qaeda and Saddam

A picture of Mohamed Atta working at a construction site in Cairo after graduating. (Social Media)

Atta took the bus from Germany to Prague on the night of June 2, 2000, and the next day he set off from Prague to the United States, on a short trip that was not enough to discover the Czech city, nor is it understandable given the possibility of traveling from Germany to the United States without passing through the Czech Republic, but his trip to Prague was not the last, as Atta returned to Prague in the first months of 2001, where he met an Iraqi intelligence officer named "Ahmed Khalil Al-Ani".

Such a meeting was unusual for Atta, whose circle was limited to his brothers in jihadist ideology, al-Qaeda and those who twisted them, and he was never known to have links to Arab official bodies, especially with the jihadists' usually strong hatred of secular military regimes such as the regimes of Saddam and Assad, as soon as the September attacks occurred a few months later, Atta's photo and his name made headlines in the American media, and the excavation of the many leads of the perpetrators of the attacks began.

Less than two months later, the Czech Interior Minister at the time, "Stanislav Gross," appeared stating that Atta had entered the Czech Republic twice, and met with an Iraqi intelligence official, and investigators in Atta's links at the time said that they believed that other meetings took place between Atta and Ani, Atta before the September attacks was not striking to the attention of the Czech authorities in any way, but Alani was the person who was monitored, Prague has always been skeptical of Iraqi intelligence activities, and thought that the Iraqi regime wanted to carry out a "terrorist act" against The headquarters of Radio Freedom, which broadcast messages against the Iraqi regime, according to the Christian Science Monitor, and that it may use al-Qaeda to carry out its attack, but the American writer "Lori Millroy" believed that the communication between the Iraqi regime and Atta involved more than cooperation for the benefit of the Iraqi regime, and that the latter entrusted Atta and his companions with the task of carrying out the attacks of the eleventh of September.

It was not strange for Milroy to receive an accusation without evidence so comfortably, and she is the author of an entire book about Saddam Hussein's regime in 2000 accusing him of fighting a non-stop war against the United States, and of carrying out the bombing in 1993 at the World Trade Center in New York City, so she became famous among neoconservative American politicians during the George W. Bush administration, especially after the September attacks, and it was logical for Milroy to think that what happened was the brainchild of Saddam Hussein quickly unleashed a torrent of hypothetical scenarios about Saddam's relationship with al-Qaeda, Prague's link to al-Qaeda's activities, and other flimsy threads that have been weaving without hard evidence.

The Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unending War Against America by Laurie Milroy. (Social Media)

For example, Friedrich Steinhausler, an arms expert at Stanford University, said at the time that the illegal acquisition of highly enriched uranium, uncovered by the Czech police in 1994 and involving organized crime groups from Belarus, Russia, the Czech Republic and Germany, was originally an operation for one buyer, al-Qaeda (without providing evidence, of course), and then said in a statement to Radio Liberty that al-Qaeda tried to obtain nuclear warheads through Chechens until they were detected by the Russian authorities.

Later, the newspaper "The Observer" made its contribution and said that the Iraqi link may have provided Atta and his men with passports and logistical facilities to carry out the September attacks, then the British newspaper "The Independent" went further, and quoted the words of "Vince Cannistraro", a former US intelligence official, that the terrorist attacks on two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 aroused the "fascination" of Saddam Hussein, and that he sent a security official named "Farouk Hijazi" at the time to negotiate with bin Laden and al-Qaeda for cooperation, and in the meantime Czech police suspect a meeting that may have taken place in Prague between Atta and Farouk Hijazi as well.

One year later, not only did Atta and Hijazi meet as those doubts went, but the world also experienced an even more severe surprise: Muhammad Atta had never met an Iraqi official in his life, entered Prague only hours in June 2000 to board a cheap plane to New York, and did not return to the small European country before the September attacks, as he claimed, but remained in his residence in the US state of Florida.

Iraq War. Kitchen Fact-Making

The White House realized that the invasion of Iraq could not be justified by claiming an unsubstantiable relationship between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and then resorted to a new claim: Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. (Reuters)

According to the New York Times reported in October 2002, Czech President Václav Havel passed messages to the White House "without fanfare" that there was no compelling evidence of reports that Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer had met in Prague months before the September attacks. Its quest to prove the link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime, as the reports were the first "alleged" evidence of a direct link between the perpetrators of the attacks and the Iraqi regime at the time, but the gift had had its effect, and served its purpose to a large extent, and it seems that its denial of Prague did not change much of the calculations of the US administration, which proceeded towards the invasion of Iraq six months later in March 2003, and did not concern it with what is real or not as much as it occupied the manufacture of its own facts to It proceeds with the decision to overthrow the Iraqi regime.

In an interview with CNN, December 2, 2001, host Wolf Blitzer asked then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, "Some former and possibly current government officials say there are strong indications that Iraqis are connected to the September 11 attacks, specifically the Prague meetings between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqi intelligence man. In a September 8, 2002 interview with NBC News, Powell replied without hesitation, "There is no doubt that these meetings took place," and in an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney on September <>, <>, with NBC News, Cheney was asked whether reports of Atta's movements in Prague were indeed reliable, to which Cheney flimsy and manipulative replied, "They are reliable, but the best way to describe this point now is that it has not yet been confirmed."

According to a Washington Post report dated May 1, 2002, investigations by the CIA and FBI yielded no confirmation of Atta's connection to Iraq or a meeting in Prague, and the newspaper reported that "analysts looked at thousands of travel papers and concluded that there was no evidence that Atta left and returned to the United States at the same time he was found in Prague (allegedly)," as Robert Mueller, director of the FBI at the time, said: "We looked at every registered entry available to us, from flight bookings to car rental documents and bank accounts, and found no evidence of Atta in Prague at the alleged time." This was also confirmed by George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence before Congress, in October 2002.

As a result, the relationship between the intelligence services and the White House strained in that period, as senior intelligence officials were appalled by Bush's insistence on finding a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, and according to the American writer "James Rysen", the battle between the White House and the CIA took place out of sight, and included exciting chapters that did not come to light until years after the war, Cheney tried to pressure analysts affiliated with the intelligence to change their position, and a number of intelligence officials have been leaking Don's statements. Their names told the press that the agency did not believe there was a link between Saddam and the September attacks, and in the midst of that battle, the Bush administration established an anti-CIA intelligence unit to search for evidence that the agency allegedly "ignored" by Bush's men, and then a team selected by Douglas Feith, a hardliner of Saddam Hussein's regime in the US administration, worked to find alleged evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaeda from information available to the US Department of Defense.

Tensions between the two sides subsided only when the White House itself realized that the invasion of Iraq could not be justified by claiming an unprovable relationship between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and then resorted to a new claim, which is Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, and Reisen says that intelligence quickly became enthusiastic about this transformation, despite its weakness due to the existence of an actual history of Saddam Hussein and his regime in seeking a nuclear weapon, although the Iraqi nuclear program actually ended in 1991, and here he turned The White House and intelligence are partners in ignoring all evidence that exonerated Iraq of possessing or seeking weapons of mass destruction, and the misleading fact-making machine went on to make its mark until U.S. tanks actually entered Baghdad.

Facts in Washington's Labyrinths

Laurie Milroy in an interview with CBS talks about Saddam's links to al-Qaeda and his role in the 1993 attacks

One of the ironies seems to be that Milroy, who wrote a book condemning Saddam's regime and its wars with the United States, was one of the enthusiasts of the Iraqi regime in the eighties in the midst of its war with Iran, when the hostility between Washington and Tehran was most intense in the wake of the Iranian revolution, in the summer of 1988 she wrote an article entitled "The Alternative Baghdad", in which she asserted that Washington should adopt support for Saddam, and that the convergence of American and Iraqi interests is clearly visible in confronting the Islamic Republic. Iran, Milroy has considered that Saddam's regime is "secular and rational", and that "his embrace of Arab nationalism is fading day by day", and that he is working on reforms similar to Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union, and then it could be "Anwar Sadat" for the nineties of the twentieth century, Milroy not only wrote in defense of Saddam at the time, but also enjoyed a close relationship with "Nizar Hamdoun", the Iraqi ambassador in Washington at the time, and it was rumored that she tried to open an indirect channel of communication between Iraqis and the Israelis.

However, the positions of the American writer quickly reversed during the invasion of Kuwait, and with the rise of George W. Bush, the writer became a permanent guest on media programs after the September attacks to attack Saddam and his regime, likely after her efforts to turn him into a new "Sadat" failed, as she expected, and in her testimony before Congress on July 9, 2003, the writer said that one indication of a link between Iraq and the September attacks is that a number of attackers who were born and raised in the State of Kuwait Their personal identity documents date back to the period immediately before the liberation of Kuwait, implying that the Iraqi regime has been connected to them since its occupation of Kuwait in 1990, and Melroy elaborated on the activities of Iraqi intelligence among the Baloch Sunni minority (located on both sides of the southern borders of Iran and Pakistan), and that she used them in her efforts to target the Iranian regime. Which was not based on physical evidence, of course.

The Iraq war not only revealed the lack of understanding in many corridors of American power for the Middle East, but also revealed a good sector of journalists looking for a semi-official status, who move comfortably between the corridors of the press, research centers and American institutions, and sometimes even reach already full official qualities, without scrutiny from decision-makers in their history, the consistency of their positions and the sobriety of their opinions, not to mention their personal and political motives. Formal appointment to the Defense Department's Special Terrorism and Deterrence Force Council in the aftermath of the September attacks as a supposedly counterterrorism expert, and then set out to work on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan for the U.S. military as a "cultural adviser," which now seems ironic given her apparent shortcomings of visions, the extreme arbitrariness with which she drew a straight line between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the period of the invasion of Kuwait, and the Baloch identity of some of the perpetrators of the September attacks.

Similarity of names and weak memory

Muhammad Atta on his way to the plane on September 11, 2001. (Social Media)

After the world was shaken by the attacks of September 2001, and the Czech and German services began to dig through their papers and information about "Mohamed Atta", it turned out that the man had previously tried to enter Prague in May 2000, and that the Czech authorities refused to enter him because he did not have the necessary visa to enter his passport, and since all the authorities knew from documented data that Muhammad Atta had succeeded in entering Prague for the first time already for a few hours in the immediately following month, theories quickly went Western intelligence agencies have suggested that Prague cannot be a stop on Atta's route to the United States, and that his insistence on entering it until he finally succeeds in doing so must reveal a thread linked to the September attacks.

At the same time, a Czech intelligence agent informed his officials that Muhammad Atta, whose photographs were circulated around the world at the time, was the same man he had seen with al-Ani (an Iraqi intelligence officer) in April 2001, an estimate based on his memory, which turned out to have betrayed him and that he had miscalculated. It is the strongest thread in the Bush administration's media campaign to link Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qaeda until the winter of 2001.

When the Czech authorities realized that they mistook a meeting between Atta and Ani, they slowly began to retreat to avoid embarrassment, Miloš Zaman, the Czech prime minister at the time, said that "Atta called an Iraqi agent, not to plan an attack (on the United States), but to carry out a terrorist attack on the Radio Freedom building," and in December Czech President Václav Havel came out and said publicly that the probability of meeting Atta and Ani was only 70%, which is a strange statement Of course, it suggests manipulation of public opinion, as the figures here have no place in expressing an incident that either happened or did not happen, especially since we know today that the man told the Bush administration two months ago the unequivocal truth.

So the mystery of Atta's insistence on entering Prague in order to travel from it to the United States remained, a mystery that came a year after the invasion of Iraq, in March 2004, as an investigation by the German Federal Police at the time revealed that Muhammad Atta, who tried to enter Prague and did not succeed in May 2000, was not Muhammad Atta al-Masri who carried out the September attacks, but a Pakistani businessman with the same name, and therefore Muhammad Atta al-Masri was not insistent on entering Prague at all. He even entered the bus once on a valid visa for a cheap flight to New York, and then spent more than a year in America carrying out his famous attacks with his al-Qaeda comrades.

On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat down preparing his famous speech to the United Nations regarding Iraq and evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction, when the focus shifted to his weapons rather than his connection to al-Qaeda. Powell looked at him firmly and angrily, saying, "We took that part (of the speech) out, Steve. He will stay out of speech."