THE commission investigating the September 11 attacks declared yesterday that there was “no credible evidence” that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda, bluntly contradicting assertions made by President Bush and VicePresident Cheney this week.
The bipartisan commission, in its last day of public hearings before it issues its final report, said that Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, sought Saddam’s help but was ignored by the Iraqi regime.
During the 1990s bin Laden made overtures to Saddam, the commission said in the staff report, as he did with leaders in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere, seeking to build an Islamic army.
While Saddam dispatched a senior Iraqi intelligence official to Sudan to meet bin Laden in 1994, the commission said it had not turned up evidence of a “collaborative relationship”. Indeed, the Iraqi connection to al-Qaeda long suggested by the Bush Administration, and reasserted by Mr Bush and Mr Cheney this week, gained no currency in the 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.
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“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”, it added.
On Monday the VicePresident said in a speech that the Iraqi dictator “had long established ties with al-Qaeda”, a claim that was one of the justifications for going to war. Last September, however, Mr Bush was forced to say: “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks.”
On Tuesday, Mr Cheney was forcefully backed by Mr Bush. When asked at a press conference if he would qualify Mr Cheney’s claim or cite evidence to support it, he immediately responded by referring to the Islamic terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi, believed to be the mastermind behind many of the current attacks in Iraq.
“Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to al-Qaeda,” Mr Bush said. “He’s the person who’s still killing.” In October 2002, Mr Bush described Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, as a “very senior al-Qaeda leader”.
In February George Tenet, the former CIA Director, described Zarqawi and his network as having links to al-Qaeda but with its own “autonomous leadership”.
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On Tuesday Mr Bush added: “Saddam Hussein also had ties to terrorist organisations. In other words, he was affiliated with terrorism: Abu Nidal, the paying of families of suiciders to go kill innocent people. I mean, he is — he was no doubt a destabilising force.”
In a separate report, the commission staff said that the al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed initially proposed a multiple strike on the US involving ten aircraft. Mohammed, who is in US custody at an undisclosed location, has told his interrogators that rather than crashing his hijacked plane into a target, he wanted to kill every male passenger aboard, land at a US airport and make a “speech denouncing US policies in the Middle East before releasing all the women and children ”.
The report portrays a plot riven by internal dissent, including disagreement over whether to target the White House or the Capitol that was apparently never resolved before the attacks.
‘Terrorist’ framed
Paris: Abderazak Besseghir, 28, a French airport baggage-handler who was framed by his parents-in-law to make it look as though he was planning a terrorist attack, has been awarded €15,000 by a Paris court. Five of his in-laws, who blamed him for the death of his late wife in a house fire, received 20-month jail sentences. (AFP)