Massive kudos to Ed Morrissey for an excellent find of something absolutely critical to the 9-11 commission’s now bogus conclusions. I was a bit doubtful when the good Captain jumped from the Able Danger story to Iraqi connections to Atta (look whose talking, I jumped straight to Bergler!). But with this find I think the captain has begun to fill in a major piece of the puzzle:

With all of these references to Germany and Hamburg, the 9/11 Commission oddly failed to include a published report from March 2001 in a Parisian Arabic newspaper, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, about the arrest of two suspected Iraqi spies — based on a tip from the CIA (boldface mine):

Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany 16 March 2001
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.
…
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.

OK, this is later than the Able Danger timeframe of summer/fall of 2000, so it probably does not play into that angle. But it is clear the democrats someone on the commission may have been trying to silence any evidence whatsoever of possible collusion between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

I would like to know if these arrests were tied to anyone with the Hamburg cell Atta and Al-Shehhi (two of the Able Danger Four) were part of. It is not clear where the arrests took place.

Side note: One of the trio in the Hamburg cell was Ziad Jarrah who I initially thought stayed behind in an earlier post. Turns out he as also was probably one of the pilots on 9-11 form information here.

This is just another example of why the 9-11 commission should never been allowed to filter information to fit their pet theories – or worse, their political needs.