now he’s their fave.

Again, the author of the piece, without giving any new info or links, seems to be repeating the same regurgitated info that the Czechs had already retraced.

Correction: that *some* Czechs retraced. Others said, no, the retracing was political bull that shouldn’t have been done. And do you seriously think that these authors, Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, hadn’t heard of the earlier retracement and weren’t more familiar with the whole saga than either you or I? And you haven’t addressed the Czech reporting I cited at #35. (Sorry for the bad link; here is the correct one.)

And, once more, all this is well beside the point. Colin Powell’s mistakes, including his endorsement of Obama, are the point; see #37.

The quote you cited says, if I’m reading it right, that AD gives weight to the Czech aligations.

Yes, because Atta made several visits to Prague, and AD in some fashion (that I’m not too clear on) supported the visits that had occurred by AD’s time. Please note, however, that I don’t much care about AD, one way or the other; I only gave the quote as a later-dated example (2005 rather than 2003) of how some Czech officials have continued to stand by their original allegations. Again, I wish the article’s authors had cited or named their Czech sources. But I presume they had some, or they wouldn’t have said what they said. The alternative would be to believe that the authors made it up or, to coin a phrase, were deliberately misleading. By now, you know my basic position on that: *usually* (not alwayws), people get things wrong honestly, not dishonestly.

So, basically you left the Republican Party because you felt that Saddam Hussein was being railroaded? It doesn’t sound like you were very committed to begin with to me.

Ah-wha?????? This is cool. So I disagree with ILC on a point, and now i’m a “Saddam Sympathizer”????

Ok, let’s take Able Danger off the table. It doesn’t have anything to do with Atta and Prague. The quote you cited says, if I’m reading it right, that AD gives weight to the Czech aligations. How would that be, since AD was shut down long before Atta made the trip in question. Again, the author of the piece, without giving any new info or links, seems to be repeating the same regurgitated info that the Czechs had already retraced.

We’re never going to concede to each others points (but I’m right and your wrong), so continuing with this is fruitless. I say we drop it and find something else to disagrees on.

It doesn’t sound like you were very committed to [the GOP]

LOL – Seeing as I’m the resident ex-Democrat – who, even now, still can’t bring myself to register Republican and have only gone as far as registering Independent – I had better not touch that one.

So, basically you left the Republican Party because you felt that Saddam Hussein was being railroaded? It doesn’t sound like you were very committed to begin with to me.

DoD officials [found] three people who recall a chart with either a photo or a reference to Atta… in addition to [the two whistle-blowers].
…such a chart could [i.e., would] have been destroyed, because during Able Danger, strict regulations about destruction of documents containing information about U.S. persons were followed…

Please tell me you didn’t just take the testimony of 2 whistle-blowers, backed by 3 more witnesses, and proclaim it “crap” on the basis of your own bitterness as an ex-Republican.

Please tell me you didn’t just use “Able Danger”

Further and further afield… into “crap” as you put it. Can’t answer my main points, eh?

Able Danger = Crap. according to the DoD. Or are they lying too?

And then, you had stupid Rick Santorum peddling HOT EXPLOSIVE new evidence proving that Saddam had WMD’s, Except not. The document was already known, and it details munitions that had already been destroyed. Santorum and Weldon made a fool of the Republicans, and these back to back to back false claims looked ridiculous and desperate, which they were. I was one of those Republicans, and it was about this time I left the party.

Bad intelligence is a reason for a grudge (if Powell must hold grudges) against the intelligence agencies that provided it. It is no reason for wanting to “to poke a stick in the eyes” of his own political party.

Anyone who thinks the intelligence debacle has anything to do with Powell’s endorsement of Obama is just plain stupid. Powell is a black Washington insider and social lefty. He endorsed Obama because Obama is a black lefty. That’s all there is to it.

(1) Colin Powell, Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley endorsements of Obama all represent a triumph of emotion (false hope) over reason.

(2) The idea that there was anything deliberately misleading about the Iraq pre-war intelligence has long since been debunked. Commission after commission studied the issue, here and in the UK, and found there was nothing deliberately misleading about it.

(3) Powell is a creature of the Washington establishment, playing to Bob Woodward’s typewriter and a possible Obama administration, and in many ways a fool who can’t take responsibility for his mistakes.

(4) Powell *wasn’t* there (i.e., close to and therefore authoritative on) the intelligence gathering, the intelligence vetting, and many key decisions.

The two authors focus on Able Danger and the lameness of the 9-11 Commission, but include this relevant tidbit:

A former Czech deputy foreign minister, later ambassador to the UN, gave statements that he personally expelled a high raking Iraqi embassy official in Prague for being a covert foreign intelligence agent after the latter was discovered to have met with Mohammed Atta in the international lounge at the Prague airport in August 2001. There the Iraqi transferred a large amount of cash to Atta, sufficient to fund the completion of the September 11 attack. Despite cruel pressure from mainstream media, the hard Left, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, the Czechs insisted that their report was correct. Former Congressman John LeBoutellier was furious at the Bush administration for bowing to CIA pressure to discount the Czech report because it verified a vital deadly connection within the covert terrorist community. Now it appears as if the Czechs – and those who supported their account – were right.

This Atta-Iraqi meeting did not track well with some of the 9/11 Commission’s pre-ordained agenda and had to be firmly discounted. They were able to accomplish this through a lame credit card receipt that could have been signed by any of Atta’s cell.

Yes, I wish they’d named names. Yes, I’m sorry that I don’t personally know them or any Czech official who served as their source, so that I could personally call the official each Christmas to find out if he still held to his opinion in 2006, 2007 and 2008.

OK, I really can’t spend any more time on this. You’re welcome.

Immediately after the occupation of Baghdad, the CIA succeeded in obtaining nearly the complete archive of the Foreign Ministry and some of the material belonging to the Iraqi secret service. [And] Czech security organs now have access to documents from Iraq’s embassy in Prague… Although it has not bee proved whether [Iraqi consul al-Ani] met with the terrorist Mohammad Atta… new information from the American, the German, and the Czech [intelligence] services indicates that Atta’s visits to Prague were important…

Money for a Terrorist
Muhammad Atta… flew to Prague for the first time on May 30, 2000. He had applied for a visa four days earlier and sat on a plane in Hamburg, although his application had not yet been acted on, and he must have known that Czech officials would not admit him to Czech territory. And, indeed, they didn’t: Atta spent six hours in the duty-free zone of the Prague airport and then flew back…

…During [Atta's second visit to Prague], the future terrorist arrived by bus on June 2, 2000. According to a closed-circuit camera and information from the Security Information Service (BIS) [the Czech intelligence agency], Atta lingered for a while at the Happy Day casino at Prague’s Florenc station and departed the next day on a Czech Airlines flight to New York. No record, however, has been found of his having spent the night at any Czech hotel; hence it appears he stayed at a private residence. What is interesting is the fact, unpublicized until now, that three days after this Prague visit, tens of thousands of dollars were transferred from several accounts to Atta’s own American and German bank accounts…

…[re: April 2001:] The Czech secret service received from one of its informers a warning that Al-Ani, the Iraqi consul, was to meet with a “distinguished Arab student” from Hamburg—this is information that up until now was top secret. BIS monitored the meeting: The men met in a Prague restaurant on the evening of April 8. To this day, it remains unclear whether this “Hamburg student” was Atta. Yet again, *three days after that meeting, $100,000 arrived in Atta’s Florida account.* [emphasis added]

In his report a year ago, Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general of the U.S. Justice Department, rejected the possibility of Atta’s April visit. In the document, he asserted that two days before the supposed Prague meeting, Atta flew from Virginia Beach to New York and, 70 hours later, was again in Florida. Atta could have managed the Prague meeting only with difficulty. Yet, according to new and as yet unpublished information from U.S. security services, there exists no record of Atta’s movement from the beginning of March 2001 to the end of April of that year.

“At first we checked only two days around April 8, when Al-Ani had the meeting with the supposed student who is believed to be Atta. Considering new information from the United States about Atta’s six-week disappearance, we have broadened our inquiry to an extended time frame; that means checking tens of thousands of records of airplane passengers and hotel guests,” a BIS operative asserts. “Atta could have simply come here a lot sooner than when he met with Al-Ani. He could have had a series of meetings in Germany and then in Prague…”…

[more on The Capture of Al-Ani...]

Also – Buried in your own citation that is supposedly *against* the idea of Czech officials standing by their claims about Atta, are quotations from Czech officials *defending* their claims, including this tidbit:

Bublan [head of Czech intelligence] said solid evidence existed proving that Atta had entered and left Prague. “Once he arrived by bus and continued by plane, the next time he arrived by plane and left by plane,” he said. “It may be more important that he lived in Germany and no one picked up on what was going on,” Bublan said…

And what is more: The most that Bublan could manage to say against the idea, and the source of your citation’s rather overblown and slanted headline, was that:

he doubted whether Atta would have met Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani [in April] so close to the Sept. 11 attacks.

He “doubted” – repeat, “doubted” – that FIVE months was enough time for Atta to get back to America? Sounds like a lame denial, to me!

OK? Enough on the asides?

it’s NOT from the CIA

Dang, I blew that. The surfing that led me to it had framed it as something else and – as I’ve said several times now – I was operating on a hurried time budget. Thanks for the correction.

Hayes described the memo this way:

It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old.

So much for your claim that it’s a few details out of context, blah blah blah. And it wasn’t just drawn from the CIA, but also the FBI, DIA and NSA’s work, which Feith quoted or closely summarized at length in the 16-page memo.

This whole discussion is beside the point, sonic. Let’s reset.

(1) I claimed that the Colin Powell, Christopher Hitchens and Christopher Buckley endorsements of Obama all represent a triumph of emotion (false hope) over reason. That claim stands, and indeed you’ve hardly touched it. (Perhaps you agree?)

(2) I claimed that the idea that there was anything deliberately misleading about the Iraq pre-war intelligence has long since been debunked. Commission after commission studied the issue, here and in the UK, and found there was nothing deliberately misleading about it. That claim stands, and indeed you’ve hardly touched it.

(3) I claimed that Powell is a creature of the Washington establishment, playing to Bob Woodward’s typewriter and a possible Obama administration, and in many ways a fool who can’t take responsibility for his mistakes. That claim stands. Indeed, you’ve hardly touched it.

(4) I claimed Powell *wasn’t* there (i.e., close to and therefore authoritative on) the intelligence gathering, the intelligence vetting, and many key decisions. That claim stands. Indeed, you’ve hardly touched it.

(5) In a complete aside, unimportant to any of the above, I claimed that Czech intelligence officials (more than one) still stand by their claim that Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague. Of that he visited Prague in 1994 and 2000, there is no doubt. Of that he visited in 2001, and/or that he met specifically with Iraqi agents to discuss matters yet unknown, a lively debate has raged over the years – in which some Czech officials have stood by their claims, while being contradicted by others. You’ve written on that aside. And proven only that when I’m in a hurry, I can’t tell the difference between quotations of direct CIA product and quotations of someone closely summarizing CIA product.

Long story short, sonic: You’ve progressively drawn the discussion into arguments over trivia… for what?

As your own 2008 article citation points out:

a recent study of Iraqi regime documents captured by the U.S. military after the invasion, without addressing the Feith Memo directly, confirms its most important argument – that the Iraqi regime supported a wide range of Islamic radicals, including Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy for more than two decades.

Feith’s recollections of the bureaucratic fights between the Pentagon and the State Department provide a necessary corrective to the over-simplified, pro-State Department narrative that has emerged from articles and books written by those outside of that process. (Those tensions began in the days right after 9/11, when Colin Powell [started mixing it up]…

As for this, addressed to me:

your one great source of all things Iraq War Doug Feith

Not at all. I merely mentioned his book as a counterweight to Powell’s innumerable Iraq War books written under the alias “Bob Woodward”. (joke with an important kernel of truth) Could you be projecting, sonic? I mean, given what you’ve written in this thread, it’s legitimate to ask if perhaps Powell is your one source.

In **2002**, the Czech **Government** officially backed away from the Atta claim… [emphasis added]

Going in circles. *sigh*

US officials have said their records — including bank surveillance photos and cellular phone records — place Atta in Virginia Beach, Va. and Coral Springs, Fla. in April 2001, around the time the alleged meeting with Ani allegedly took place in Prague, according to the Sept. 11 report.

Ditto. The cellular record intelligence was always inconclusive, just like the rest of this stuff. As has already been discussed in articles we’ve cited.

miraculously Feith, Cheney, Bush, Rummey, et al. are immune to [ego and incompetence]

According to whom? *Not I.”

Perhaps you should take your own advise instead of parroting the ignorant yet predictable idea that Powell would just endorse Obama because they are both black.