Congressional hearings coming this fall into revelations by the military intelligence group Able Danger could spotlight other evidence overlooked by the 9/11 Commission: including a March 2001 report suggesting that Osama bin Laden was working with Iraqi intelligence operatives in Germany at a time when Mohamed Atta and two other 9/11 hijack team leaders were living in Hamburg.
On March 16, 2001, the Paris-based newspaper Al Watan al Arabi reported:
"Two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties."
Al Watan said that German intelligence was investigating "serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin.* The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies."
The pre-9/11 Al Watan report continued:
"German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin."
A timeline established by U.S. intelligence shows that three out of four 9/11 hijack team leaders, Mr. Atta, Marwan al Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, lived in Hamburg from Nov. 1998 thru Feb. 2001.
The Weekly Standard, which covered the Al Watan report this week in a story by Captain's Quarter's blogger Ed Morrissey noted:
"Despite this contemporaneous report about the nature of the German arrests and the involvement of American counterintelligence officials in the investigation, not a word of the affair appears in the 9/11 Commission's final report."
This fall's hearings will undoubtedly begin with questions about why both the 9/11 Commission and the Clinton administration dismissed Able Danger's stunning identification of Mohamed Atta inside the U.S.
But any congressional investigation that doesn't explore other overlooked bombshells - including indications of possible Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks - will leave even more important questions unanswered.
