A long time ago, I heard the following joke: The Illiad and The Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another Greek named Homer.
Funny? Well, maybe not. There's some truth to this, though. If you Google my name ("Don Harlow"), you'll find a whole lot of pages with that name on them. Most of them are mine, thanks to my on-line work for Esperanto. But somewhere in there, you'll find one about a Don Harlow buried at the Arlington National Cemetery -- the one who was, for a number of years, the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. He wasn't me -- I think.
The question arises because last Sunday, while I was getting dressed, I heard Richard Ben-Veniste and John Lehman discussing the 9/11 panel's work with Tim Russert. Ben-Veniste was emphasizing that the panel had pretty much decided (read: "demonstrated") that there was no link between the Al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's non-religious police state in Iraq. This is not a pleasant concept for the administration; that linkage was close behind the illusory Weapons of Mass Destruction in their decision to make war on little Iraq. As late as last week, Vice-President Cheney was stating that he had information (that maybe the panel didn't have -- whyever not?) that demonstrated such a link. As an example, former navy secretary Lehman pointed to a high officer in Saddam's militia who was also a member of Al-Qaeda.
Today the Washington Post advises us that this appears to be a confusion of names. The officer in Iraq, one Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad, is quite likely not the same as Al-Qaeda's Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, who seems to have operated in Malaysia, quite a distance away from Iraq. The Post also reports that this confusion was already called into question months ago by U.S. intelligence agencies, and that the link has already been soundly rejected by those in the know.
Such name confusions are not, I believe, new; I vaguely remember a report of some confusion between Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 terrorist, and some other Mohammed Atta. (Atta, too, was supposedly a link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, based on a reported meeting between him and a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, Czech Republic; but phone records show that the terrorist Atta seems to have been using his cell phone in Florida on the day he was supposedly in Prague. Teleportation, anyone?)
It will be a shame -- at least for the administration! -- if this does prove to be no more than a confusion of names, as seems to be the case. Though I suspect that many of those who watched Meet the Press won't hear of this refutation of Lehman's claim, and will continue to believe -- along with, at one point, over half of all Americans -- that the link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda has been satisfactorily demonstrated.
In the meantime, I suspect that the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force should receive a pretty hefty pension. I wonder why the government isn't sending it to me.
Note: I got tickets today for my wife and myself to see Fahrenheit 9/11 this Friday evening at our local cineplex (Century 16). Looks as though the campaign by "Move America Forward" -- a front organization for Republican Party-associated PR firm Russo Marsh and Rogers -- to intimidate theater owners, and particularly franchises, from showing Moore's new film has fizzled. Bad luck, boys.