Atta Boy, Dick

Posted by Mary Mancini on September 14, 2006 under Uncategorized |

Way to perpetuate the myth that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi spy in Prague prior to 9/11.

Uncensored portions of the Senate report say that by January 2003, the CIA had issued two assessments questioning whether the Prague meeting occurred. In these assessments, the agency said that neither it nor the FBI were able to confirm the meeting happened.

A former senior intelligence official who was in active service at the time confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the White House on multiple occasions had proposed inserting the Atta-in-Prague anecdote in speeches by both the president and Vice President Dick Cheney. The official said that the CIA usually objected to the White House proposals. Although Bush never mentioned the Atta anecdote, Cheney referred to it on several occasions—most recently in a TV appearance last weekend on NBC’s “Meet the Press” during which he conceded that the claim that Atta had a pre-9/11 meeting with an Iraqi spook had never been confirmed.

Democrats also publicly report that an internal CIA watchdog known as the “politicization ombudsman” had looked into complaints that the administration was pressuring intelligence analysts to come up with intelligence connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda. According to the Democrats, the ombudsman told committee investigators that he felt the “hammering” that intelligence analysts got from administration policymakers on Iraq intelligence was, in the Democrats’ language, “harder than he had previously witnessed in his 32-year career” at the CIA.

This is why people still believe the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.