there was no evidence of operational collaboration was justified. While Saddam was not involved in the September 11 attacks, members of his government did have contacts with al-Qaeda over the years; many of the links, as will be seen below, are not considered by experts and analysts as convincing evidence of a collaborative operational relationship. Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke writes, [t]he simple fact is that lots of people, particularly in the Middle East, pass along many rumors and they end up being recorded and filed by U.S. intelligence agencies in raw reports. That does not make them 'intelligence'. Intelligence involves analysis of raw reports, not merely their enumeration or weighing them by the pound. Analysis, in turn, involves finding independent means of corroborating the reports. Did al-Qaeda agents ever talk to Iraqi agents? I would be startled if they had not. I would also be startled if American, Israeli, Iranian, British, or Jordanian agents had somehow failed to talk to al-Qaeda or Iraqi agents. Talking to each other is what intelligence agents do, often under assumed identities or 'false flags,' looking for information or possible defectors. Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Voice of America that ... Saddam Hussein had his agenda and al-Qaida had its agenda, and those two agendas were incompatible. And so if there was any contact between them, it was a contact that was rebuffed rather than a contact that led to meaningful relationships between them. Lack of evidence The purported meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi Intelligence officer, regarding which Vice President Cheney had stated "we've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it", was dismissed by CIA Director George Tenet, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2004 that there was no evidence to support that allegation. In fact, the FBI had evidence that Atta was in Florida at the time, taking aircraft flight training; and the Iraqi officer in question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, has been captured and maintains he had never met Atta. The repeated accusation by Cheney that Iraq harbored Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, conflicts with Iraq's 1998 offer to the FBI of extradition for Yasin in return for a statement clearing Iraq from any