A US Senate commission has concluded that Saddam Hussein played no part in the September 11 terrorist attacks, bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration.
The commission charged with investigating the 2001 atrocity reported today that there was “no credible evidence” that the deposed Iraqi dictator helped al-Qaeda to target America.
The Bush Administration has long claimed links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s terror network, and cited them as one reason for last year’s invasion of Iraq.
As recently as Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator “had long established ties with al-Qaeda”.
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But the alleged connection gained no currency in today’s report.
“Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded,” the report said.
“There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda also occurred” after bin Laden moved his operations to Afghanistan in 1996, “but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.
“Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaeda and Iraq.”
The chilling report uses information from captured al-Qaeda operatives to sketch the development of the terror movement, from the founding of its training camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere, to the way it found funding from “well-placed financial facilitators and diversions of funds from Islamic charities”.
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Reports that bin Laden had a huge personal fortune to finance acts of terror were overstated, it says.
The commission found that bin Laden had made overtures to Saddam for assistance, as he did with leaders in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere as he sought to build an Islamic army.
While Saddam dispatched a senior Iraqi intelligence official to Sudan to meet bin Laden in 1994, the commission said that it had not turned up evidence of a “collaborative relationship”.
The commission grudgingly concluded that bin Laden’s terrorist training camps were “apparently quite good”. Terrorists-to-be were encouraged to “think creatively about ways to commit mass murder,” it stated.
“A worldwide jihad needed terrorists who could bomb embassies or hijack airliners, but it also needed foot soldiers for the Taleban in its war against the Northern Alliance, and guerrillas who could shoot down Russian helicopters in Chechnya or ambush Indian units in Kashmir.”
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According to one unnamed senior al-Qaeda associate, various ideas for atrocities were floated by the fighters in Afghanistan, the commission said.
The options included taking over a missile launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear warhead at the United States. Other ideas were to mount mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iraq, or to release poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building.
“Last but not least, hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport or nearby city,” it stated.
In a separate report, the commision said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior al-Qaeda planner captured in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban, initially proposed a September 11 attack involving ten aircraft.
An expanded target list included the CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear plants and tall buildings in California and Washington state.
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The commission issued its findings today at the start of two days of public hearings into the worst terrorist attacks in American history.
The panel intends to issue a final report in July on the hijackings in 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people, destroyed the World Trade Centre in New York and damaged the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth aircraft commandeered by terrorists crashed in the countryside in Pennsylvania