In the coming days and months, Fanning’s question played over and over in my head. Even with my background, I had no idea why Mohamed Atta and his cohorts had felt the way they did. I hadn’t grown up hating the United States. The attacks had been a surprise to me, too. I felt compelled to learn what had driven those men and what drove others like them.
We were already hearing about the possibility of an American war in Iraq. Through the fall of 2002 and into early 2003, I closely followed the coverage of the UN inspectors, who were searching for the weapons of mass destruction that U.S. officials said made Saddam Hussein a global threat. I was still a university student, but because I was of Arab descent and working part-time for the Post, a local radio station in Frankfurt asked me to join a debate about the war. The other panelists supported the invasion, but I couldn’t contain myself. The weapons inspectors should be allowed to finish their job, I told the audience. If the United States invaded Iraq and it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, there would be more terrorism. My sister and a friend were in the audience and clapped, but this wasn’t what German intellectuals and diplomats wanted to hear. Afterward, some of the other panelists refused to shake my hand.
Instead, people argued in op-ed pieces and on TV that even if Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he was a bad person, a despot who was killing his own people, a monster who had gassed the Kurds. I couldn’t argue with any of this, but these things had been known for many years. But where was the evidence that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction or that he planned to use them? An important source for the Americans was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi asylum seeker who came to Germany in 1999. He told the German intelligence agency that he had worked at an agricultural facility in Iraq that served as a cover for a secret biological weapons program. Al-Janabi’s alarming claims were shared with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and while the Germans later warned the Americans about the possible unreliability of the source (who was given the code name Curveball by U.S. intelligence agencies), the Bush administration ignored the warnings and treated the allegations as fact.
At the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that Saddam Hussein was linked to the September 11 attacks through his support of an Al Qaeda offshoot in Iraq. Powell spoke of the “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.” Hussein’s Iraq was now home, he said, to “a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” a Jordanian who had fought in Afghanistan more than a decade earlier and was a close collaborator of Osama bin Laden. According to Powell, Zarqawi had returned to Afghanistan in 2000 and had overseen a terrorist training camp there that specialized in poisons.
Powell’s words, and their implications, were terrifying. Today we know that Saddam Hussein hated Al Qaeda as much as the Americans did and that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction. But at the time, public opinion was divided. Some of my professors said that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would violate international law, while others seemed eager for a war. “Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man,” one of my professors argued. “If he has these weapons, the world is in danger.”
“Whatever happened to presenting evidence and proving someone’s guilt?” I responded.
He didn’t want to hear it. He was certain Iraq would be a better place with Saddam gone. All this speculation made me angry. I felt that I needed to be in Iraq, to see with my own eyes what was happening there. I didn’t want to be like those foreign affairs “experts” who lived comfortably in Germany but went on TV day and night to talk about global hot spots they never dared to visit. I thought back to the famous foreign correspondent who spoke to my journalism school class about reporting on Iran by telephone.
I asked Peter about the possibility of going to Iraq for the Post. “Are you really sure you want to go there now and end up in the war?” he asked. “What about your parents? What do they say?”
“I haven’t told them yet.”
After a few hours, Peter called back. “Okay,” he said. “If you can get a visa, there is one story we should try to do as soon as possible. We need to find the diplomat who allegedly met with Mohamed Atta in Prague. We need to find al-Ani.”
Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was an Iraqi intelligence officer who had been working as a diplomat in Prague in 2001, and who was accused of having met with Atta in April of that year, five months before the attacks on New York and Washington. A senior Czech official had mentioned the meeting at a press conference in October 2001, and it became a key piece of evidence tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.
I asked for a meeting at the Iraqi embassy in Berlin to request a visa. When I arrived, the consular official stared at me. “You want to go to Iraq? Now?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“You want to go there at a time when people are trying to find a way to leave?” he asked me. “To watch the war?”
“No. I want to go there and see if the reasons for a possible war are true or not.”
He looked at me, his dark brown eyes widening. “Who cares if the reasons are true?” he asked. “Do you think anyone cares about the truth? You are so na?ve. You think the Americans care about Iraqi lives? About the fact that we had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction?”
“I want to go and find out what the truth is,” I told him. “My colleague and I are really interested in finding the truth.”
He laughed out loud. “Let’s see what Baghdad thinks about this, and if they’ll give you a visa.” He stood up and reached out to shake my hand.
“How will I know if I get the visa?”
“You will be called.”
I got ready to go. “Wait,” he told me. He was scribbling something on a piece of paper. “This is my number in Iraq. I’m sure the Germans will soon throw us out. In case you make it to Iraq, call.”
I took his contact information and left.
*
EVEN THOUGH I was still living at home, my parents didn’t know about my plans. My bedroom doubled as my office, but I had my own phone line, and when I made phone calls about Iraq, I spoke in whispers. I didn’t think there was any point in telling them until I got a visa.
And I was right. The call from the embassy never came. Instead, as the diplomat had predicted, he and his colleagues were asked to leave Germany. It was clear that the war was coming.
None of this deterred me. I nagged Peter, asking him to help me get approval from the Post to look for al-Ani, even if I didn’t get an official visa. Maybe I could go in after the invasion, if the Americans or someone else took control.