Edward Jay Epstein reexamines the supposed Prague meeting between September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence agent Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. The meeting had supposedly been “disproven”, but Epstein’s investigation finds that that the evidence points to an entirely different conclusion.
Supposedly the FBI had said that Atta was in Virginia at the time of the April 2001 meeting. However, Epstein finds that could simply not be the case:
All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license. His international license was at his father’s home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, “It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias” to “meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.” Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.
The incident in Prague refuses to be explained away. We know that al-Ani was in Prague at the same time as Atta. We know that Atta visited Prague twice, both times to meet with someone. After one of these meetings a large sum of money was given to Atta for the hijacking plot. We have members of the Czech intelligence community who continue to stick by their story.
This evidence cannot be brushed aside. The case of the Prague meeting is still very much open, waiting for someone to put the pieces together and find what Atta was doing in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent. The results of that search could be nothing less than explosive.
