I’m getting a lot of mail contending that the 9/11 Commission debunked the claim that Ahmed Hikmat Shakur (whose actual full name is reportedly Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi) was an Iraqi operative. This is a red herring which I address in an article that will be posted soon. For a quicker explanation, though, let me refer those who are interested to Steve Hayes’s excellent article here. To that, I add a few brief points here.

Most of us who have been pointing to Shakir never claimed he was a Fedayeen officer. We claimed he was an Iraqi intelligence operative. By coincidence, it turns out that there may be a Fedayeen officer who has close to the same name (Hikmat Shakir Ahmad) as the intelligence operative we’ve been talking about. This happenstance was discovered through documents recovered in Iraq after the invasion – i.e., long after Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi was highlighted by Hayes as a person of interest.

To be sure, if it had turned out that the Shakir we’ve been talking about had actually been a Fedayeen officer IN ADDITION TO BEING an intelligence operative, that would have helped the case for “the connection.” But being a Fedayeen officer was never part of that case (except in the minds of some people who jumped too soon at the discovery of the Fedayeen guy with the similar name). Thus, the fact that the Shakir we’re talking about is apparently not a Fedayeen officer in addition to everything else we’ve heard about him does not hurt the case at all — and certainly does not explain the “no connection whatsoever” crowd’s stunning lack of curiosity about Shakir.

Bottom line: the Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi we’ve been discussing is still a native Iraqi (a) who was called from a safehouse used by the 1993 World Trade Center bombers; (b) who got his job at the Malaysia airport in 1999 through Iraqi intelligence; (c) whose schedule at the airport was controlled by Iraqi Intelligence rather than by the airport; (d) who facilitated hijacker Khalid al-Midhar’s entrance into Malaysia; (e) who went to the infamous Malaysia meeting with al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi; (e) who left his job at the airport –never to return to it – the day after the Malaysia meeting; (f) who was in possession of contact information for key al Qaeda figures (including Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s brother) when he was detained in Qatar six days after 9/11; (g) who immediately tried to return to Baghdad after being released by Qatar, but who was detained in Jordan when he tried to make a connecting flight; (h) whom the CIA believed had counter-interrogation training when they were permitted to interview him in Jordan; and (i) who returned to Iraq upon being released by Jordan after special pleading by Saddam’s regime.

That he was probably not, in addition, a Fedayeen officer changes none of that. That would be like saying we shouldn’t investigate an apparent murderer because he may only have killed nine people rather than the ten we once suspected.