Iraqi Intelligence

Evidence of connections between Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda -- if not directly to 9/11 (the standard dodge employed by those against taking the War to Iraq) just arne't going away, and are getting stronger.

Captain Ed notes:

Germany has long been known as one of the primary logistical areas for the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Atta and several of the 9/11 hijackers spent considerable time in Hamburg especially during the recruitment and research effort in 1999 and 2000 before coming to the United States to begin the actual work of preparing the attacks.
...
With all of these references to Germany and Hamburg, the 9/11 Commission oddly failed to include a published report from March 2001 in a Parisian Arabic newspaper, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, about the arrest of two suspected Iraqi spies -- based on a tip from the CIA (boldface mine):

Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany 16 March 2001

Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that 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.

The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. 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. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be 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.

Contemporaneous reports of these arrests 6 months prior to 9/11 have been corroborated from other news sources as well, such as the BBC and Reuters -- see the rest of the updates to that link.

The 9/11 Commission seems to have been curiously uncurious about lots of things!