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.
The Associated Press
reported that the Al Qaeda document "appears to bolster U.S. claims that Iran supported the extremist network leading up to the September 11 terror attacks." The
Wall Street Journal said the document "provides new insights into Al Qaeda's relationship with Iran, suggesting a pragmatic alliance that emerged out of shared hatred of the United States and Saudi Arabia."
NBC News wrote that the document reveals that, "at various points in the relationship... Iran offered Al Qaeda help in the form of 'money, arms' and "training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon in exchange for striking American interests in the Gulf," implying that Al Qaeda had declined the offer. Former Obama National Security Council spokesman Ned Price, writing for
The Atlantic, went even further,
asserting that the document includes an account of "a deal with Iranian authorities to host and train Saudi-Al Qaeda members as long as they have agreed to plot against their common enemy, American interests in the Gulf region."
Comment: This just shows how lazy the CIA has become. Presumably the inclusion of this document was the reason they chose to release the Bin Laden docs several weeks ago. And the media ate it up, conveniently finding this needle-in-a-haystack document and hyping it in all the major publications: "Iran supports al-Qaeda!!!" The whole thing also shows just how lazy the journalists are: repeating CIA talking points without even translating and reading the document for themselves. Or maybe they just don't care. Either way, the document doesn't actually say what they said it says. In that regard, it probably
isn't a fake. And it actually implies the opposite of what the media said.
As for the document's claim of an Iranian offer to al-Qaeda, it may not have been an Iranian trick. The author may have had a motive to invent it, as Alexander Mercouris
speculates:
The purpose of the document is clearly to make the Iranians look treacherous, so the author has woven into his narrative an account of an "offer" which is intended to contrast Iran's 'duplicity' with Al-Qaeda's integrity, whilst also emphasising Al-Qaeda's self-reliance and lack of need of Iranian help.
Here it is important to say that we have not been told the context in which this document was written.
However, it looks as if someone within Al-Qaeda - possibly Osama bin Laden himself, or conceivably his rather more cerebral deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri - at about this time (apparently 2007) suggested some sort of approach to Iran.
This however provoked an angry response from the author of the document, who wrote it in order to counter this proposal.
He did so by giving an angry and no doubt heavily embroidered account of Al-Qaeda's past dealings with Iran so as to show that nothing good could come from any approach to Iran, whose help was anyway not needed.
It is easy to see why a person with that sort of motive might have invented a past offer of help from Iran in order to show that Iran's help was not needed.
Comment: Israel demands US 'military aid' then profits from sales of lethal weaponry to other countries. Such a deal.