Quote:
Originally Posted by JAD_333
I am of Blue's mind. Saddam shat a brick when he heard about 9/11 and probably knew in that instant that he was doomed. Oddly enough he did little to save himself and made all the wrong moves as the pressure for an invasion mounted. But that is another subject.
Overall, I think we can safely agree that Saddam's intel people had a link to OBL. I would have been surprised if they did not. It's the business of intel folks to nose around. But whether they were up to something involving attacks on the US is a totally separate question, and so far we have no answers. If our intel people find a smoking gun, we'll know about it within days if not hours. So far, the silence is telling.
As for the FBI agent who "lived" with Saddam for so long, it is entirely possible, knowing Saddam's shrewdness, that he gamed the agent. He knew it was his last chance to shape his history. So, he admitted some things to give others credibility. A book can't be far off.
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There was some terrific intel that has made it into open-source since 9/11, re: Saddam's inner circle making panic moves of their families and assets. If they'd been in any way culpable, it would've hapenened in slo-mo BEFORE 9/11, not the first week AFTER, and in such an obvious fashion.
They KNEW they were about to get the hammer dropped on 'em, though, even if they had aught to do with it. And they started making plans to dime out their intel services leadership, just in case we ever demanded that Iraq give us some patsies and scapegoats to slake our blood-lust, which they figgered we'd be in the mood for, because that's how THEY roll, and they thought we'd have to have some public executions to make our public NOT demand that we nuke Iraq off the map. So they were basically going to give up some of their top guys, IF their lives would buy us off. Think about how savage that is.
Looking back, when I wrote the report, I started in a dead-neutral position on the question of whether there was ANY Iraqi involvement in 9/11 (which, by simple good practice, all intelligence reporters MUST adopt to the greatest extent possible when fact-finding). As I researched and steered collection on the question, it became obvious that if Iraq had been involved, it was SO rogue and SO unsanctioned that if these guys even existed (they didn't), they were no more 'Iraqi' than the hijackers were 'Saudi'.