I am not really following the 9/11 commission --what do I call it? Is it a "gate" yet?-- thing closely. It broke while I was out of town and there are too many code names and players for my little brain to follow. Plus, it's two weeks until school starts, so I am in "I-can't-HEAR-you" mode w/ respect to anything serious. However, via Powerline, I did see this article from Ed Morrisey at the Weekly Standard, and noted this published summary of the arrests of two Iraqi intelligence officials in March, 2001. Keep in mind that the received wisdom is that there is no way Saddam would have made common cause with Al-Qaeda or vice versa because a secularist Muslim wouldn't deal with an Islamofascist, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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.
