... Iraq ties to al Qaeda (italics indicate first names that I added for clarity; bold added by me for emphasis):

Page 334 ----- "Responding to a presidential tasking, (Richard) Clarke's office sent a memo to (Condaleeza) Rice on September 18, titled 'Survey of Intelligence Information on Any Iraq Involvement in the September 11 Attacks." Rice's chief staffer on Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, concurred in its conclusion that only some anecdotal evidence linked Iraq to al Qaeda. The memo found 'no compelling case' that Iraq had either planned or perpetrated the attacks. It passed along a few foreign intelligence reports, including the Czech report alleging an April 2001 Prague meeting between (Mohammed) Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer (discussed in chapter 7) and a Polish report that personnel at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad were told before September 11 to go on the streets to gauge crowd reaction to an unspecified event. Arguing that the case for links between Iraq and al Qaeda was weak, the memo pointed out that Bin Ladin resented the secularism of Saddam Hussein's regime. Finally, the memo said, there was no confirmed reporting on Saddam cooperating with Bin Ladin on unconventional weapons.

In a footnote to the introduction to this passage (fn 57, page 559), it says:

"When the President pressed Clarke to check if Saddam was involved and said that he wanted to learn of any shread of evidence, Clarke promised to look at the question again, but added that the NSC and the intelligence community had looked in the past for linkages between al Qaeda and Iraq and never found any real linkages."

On pages 228-229, there is a separately boxed discussion of the Czech report referred to above (which report was based on information from a single Czech intelligence source, who claimed that Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat named Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, in Prague, on April 9, 2001). It includes a discussion of known evidence regarding Atta's presence in the U.S. at the time of the supposed meeting (including the fact that his cell phone was used on April 6, 9, 10 and 11 to make calls in Florida), concludes that there is no evidence he left the U.S. during this time, nor any that he was in Czechoslovakia. It also notes that both Atta and Ani deny that any such meeting took place. This section of the report concludes: "The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting."

----- jim o\-S