Eminent Domain

Andy McCarthy of The Corner highlights Edward Jay Epstein's article in the Wall Street Journal about whether Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Unfortunately, this may be one of those "we'll never really know" things. McCarthy says...

The bottom line, as Ed puts it, is that the Atta/Prague connection remains "“consigned to a murky limbo" - largely thanks to American officials leaking the possibility while the Czechs were still trying to investigate it.

McCarthy also points our how this lead got glossed over by the 9/11 Commission...

This is Able Danger all over again. The "Atta in Prague" possibility never fit the 9/11 Commission'’s narrative, so it was buried with a shoddy, slap-dash investigation -- the same treatment Able Danger got; the same treatment the Clinton Justice Department's dramatic heightening of "the wall" between criminal investigators and intelligence agents got; the same treatment the internal assessment of the Clinton administration's performance in the run-up to the Millennium bombing plot got, and so on.

The 9/11 Commission woefully inadequate in many respects and way too political. Jamie Gorelick should've been testifying before the Commission, trying to explain herself, and certainly not on the Commission.

McCarthy finishes his long but substantive post with a great paragraph...

Meanwhile, in 1998 alone, we have $300K going from Iraq to Zawahiri (al Qaeda's number 2); bin Laden's famous February fatwa calling for the murder of all Americans and prominently featuring, as part of the justification, U.S. actions against Iraq; meetings in Iraq between Qaeda members and Iraqi officials in March; meetings in Afghanistan between Iraqi officials and al Qaeda leaders in July; the embassy bombings in August, after which, of all potential targets, the Clinton administration chose to retaliate against al Shifa, believed to be an Iraq/Qaeda joint weapons venture; an Iraqi member of al Qaeda (now held in Guantanamo Bay) traveling with Iraqi Intelligence to Pakistan to plot chemical mortar attacks on the American and British embassies there; and Iraq seeking to recruit Arab terrorists to blow up Radio Free Europe. Oh, and in February 1999, Richard Clarke objected to a suggestion that U-2 flights be used to try to find bin Laden because, if bin Laden learned the walls were closing in, Clarke wrote to Sandy Berger that "“old wiley Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad."

But the anti-war left is probably right. There was no connection between Iraq and terrorism. None at all. I don't know why the right-wing nuts keep insisting there was.

Keep saying "no connection," maybe it will come true.