Al Qaeda Link To Iraq May Be Confusion Over Names

A follow up on this earlier Real Art post, from the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton:

Lehman introduced the information on NBC's "Meet the Press" to counter a commission staff report that said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda but no "collaborative relationship."

Yesterday, the senior administration official said Lehman had probably confused two people who have similar-sounding names.

One of them is Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, identified as an al Qaeda "fixer" in Malaysia. Officials say he served as an airport greeter for al Qaeda in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, at a gathering for members who were to be involved in the attacks on the USS Cole, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Iraqi military documents, found last year, listed a similar name, Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, on a roster of Hussein's militia, Saddam's Fedayeen.

"By most reckoning that would be someone else" other than the airport greeter, said the administration official, who would speak only anonymously because of the matter's sensitivity. He added that the identification issue is still being studied but "it doesn't look like a match to most analysts."

Click here for the rest.

Well, so much for this mysterious connection between the Fedayeen and al-Qaeda. This was really a non-story from the get-go. Commissioner Lehman, clearly a partisan Republican, was obviously trying to string together some kind of "argument" to weaken the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that there was no link between Saddam and bin Laden. What an asshole. This is the same kind of bullshit rhetoric that got us into this stupid war in the first place: innuendo, rumor, and suggestion substitute for facts and careful analysis. Does the truth even matter to these guys anymore?

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