Cross-posted to the E-Group.
So it turns out that when Dick Cheney kept insisting there really were ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq, he was off by one letter. The real culprit was Iran.
In its report due next week, the September 11 commission will disclose new evidence suggesting Iranian government officials may have helped facilitate the terror attacks by providing Al Qaeda members with safe passage and ?clean? passports as they traveled from Osama bin Laden?s training camps in Afghanistan through Iran, NEWSWEEK has learned.Citing a recently discovered December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, the commission report states that Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of Al Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from bin Laden?s camps through Iran, according to U.S. officials and commission sources familiar with the report.
The commission report does not address which Al Qaeda members specifically benefited from the clean passport policy. It also emphasizes that the panel has found no evidence suggesting that Iranian government officials had advance knowledge of bin Laden?s plans to attack the World Trade Towers and Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001.
But, citing the NSA memo, the report discloses for the first time that eight to ten of the so-called ?muscle hijackers? on September 11 are believed to have traveled through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001?the same period of time that Iranian border guards were facilitating the movement of extremist jihadis entering and exiting the Afghan training camps.
...Officials familiar with the findings [of the commission report] say it provides far stronger evidence of the Iranian government links to bin Laden?s organization than was found of connections between Saddam Hussein?s regime and Al Qaeda?a major bone of contention between the 9/11 panel and members of the Bush administration.
Did you note the part about the memo being from December, 2001? Oops. The article then quotes Richard Clarke's book as saying that Bush was told "The best evidence we had of state support [for Al Qaeda] was Iran." But they invaded Iraq anyway.
White House officials are characterizing the report as confusing and contradictory, but when it comes to the Middle East White House officials seem to be easily confused.
How to completely destabilize the Middle East in one easy lesson: attack the wrong Muslim country and then advertise to the world that you goofed and try to convince everyone that the real culprit is its neighbour, another Muslim country. This should go over really well.
Via The Agonist, Stratfor reports that Bush has requested Putin send Russian troops to Iraq or Afghanistan just in time for the November presidential election. And Putin is apparently receptive to the idea of responding with as many as 40,000 troops. Aside from the fact that sending Russian troops back into Afghanistan boggles the mind, does anybody else worry that the Pentagon might just get a little overambitious again now that reinforcements might be on the way?
I think things just got even more complicated.
What I find interesting is the lemons to lemonaid approach that the White House has taken on this. Rather than saying "Oops, I guess we were wrong on Iraq", they are saying "See, we were right to include Iran in the Axis of Evil".
pogge,
This is what you get when the C-I-C has spent his entire life collecting mulligans.