Shorter Ayad Allawi: I’d like to be the leader of Iraq again, please. Allawi was the interim Prime Minister of Iraq from June 2004 until April 2005. He is one of the more disreputable people among the Iraqi exile community. Back in December 2003, he made an extraordinary claim in the UK Telegraph. He claimed to have unearthed a document that turned Dick Cheney from a pathological liar into a truth-teller. The document simultaneously proved that Mohammed Atta really did receive training and direction from Iraq, but also that Saddam Hussein really did procure enriched uranium from Niger. :
Iraq’s coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.
Details of Atta’s visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day “work programme” Atta had undertaken at
at Abu Nidal’s base in Baghdad.In the memo, Habbush reports that Atta “displayed extraordinary effort” and demonstrated his ability to lead the team that would be “responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy”.
The second part of the memo, which is headed “Niger Shipment”, contains a report about an unspecified shipment – believed to be uranium – that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.
Although Iraqi officials refused to disclose how and where they had obtained the document, Dr Ayad Allawi, a member of Iraq’s ruling seven-man Presidential Committee, said the document was genuine.
“We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam’s involvement with al-Qaeda,” he said. “But this is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks.”
The idea that a document might exist that simultaneously proved an Iraq connection to 9/11 and that Niger diverted uranium to Saddam…coming in December 2003 (right before Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate l’affair Plame was rightly regarded with extreme skepticism in the American press. Only Dick Cheney’s personal stenographer, William Safire was dishonest enough to give it credence.
Example: Dr. Ayad Allawi, an Iraqi leader long considered reliable by intelligence agencies, told Britain’s Daily Telegraph last week that a memo has been found from Saddam’s secret police chief to the dictator dated July 1, 2001, reporting that the veteran terrorist Abu Nidal had been training one Mohamed Atta in Baghdad. Nobody disputes that a few months after Atta’s 9/11 suicide mission, Nidal was permanently silenced by Saddam’s police, the only “suicide” to be found with four bullets in his head.