One of Ours

“There is at least one officer of Saddam’s Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaeda,” said September 11 commission member and former Navy Secretary John Lehman.

...captured documents listed one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as a senior officer in the elite paramilitary Saddam Fedayeen. By an amazing coincidence, an Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was present at the January 2000 al-Qa’eda “summit” in Kuala Lumpur at which the September 11 attacks were planned.

It is of course possible that this was a different Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. However, Hayes reveals subsequent events showed this man was very important indeed to Iraq. Four days after September 11, he was arrested in Qatar and found to possess phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombers’ safe houses and contacts, as well as information about an al-Qa’eda plot to blow up airliners. But he was released, re-arrested in Jordan and released again (with CIA collusion) - following pressure from Iraq at the highest level.

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“Obviously, if there is any information (that) has to do with the subject of the report, we need it, and we need it pretty fast,” Commission Chairman Thomas Kean said...He said the final report would be modified to take any new intelligence into account.