Journalist Gareth Porter reports:
For many years, major U.S. institutions ranging from the Pentagon to the 9/11 Commission have been pushing the line that Iran secretly cooperated with Al Qaeda both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. But the evidence for those claims remained either secret or sketchy, and always highly questionable.
In early November, however, the mainstream media claimed to have its "smoking gun"—a CIA document written by an unidentified Al Qaeda official and released in conjunction with 47,000 never-before-seen documents seized from Osama bin Laden's house in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
[..] But none of those media reports were based on any careful reading of the document's contents. The 19-page Arabic-language document, which was translated in full for TAC, doesn't support the media narrative of new evidence of Iran-Al Qaeda cooperation, either before or after 9/11, at all. It provides no evidence whatsoever of tangible Iranian assistance to Al Qaeda. On the contrary, it confirms previous evidence that Iranian authorities quickly rounded up those Al Qaeda operatives living in the country when they were able to track them down, and held them in isolation to prevent any further contact with Al Qaeda units outside Iran.
What it shows is that the Al Qaeda operatives were led to believe Iran was friendly to their cause and were quite taken by surprise when their people were arrested in two waves in late 2002. It suggests that Iran had played them, gaining the fighters' trust while maximizing intelligence regarding Al Qaeda's presence in Iran.
Full article is well worth reading, a great deal of detail is provided.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Fluffeh on Friday November 24 2017, @01:39AM (1 child)
Let's not let the actual truth get in the way of a good political angle that we'er selling.
However, what I find more insulting - is that the people selling that story would have known - and therefore were flat out lying. And there's no repercussions for it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday November 24 2017, @02:11AM
Of course the people selling that story knew, a bunch of Saudis flew planes into the World Trade Centre, let's invade Iraq.
The whole thing was bullshit from the start.