With thanks to W. Scott Malone << One member indicated that the panel has already seen documents that point to a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. ''There is evidence,'' said former Navy secretary John Lehman. ''There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons,'' including teaching operatives hijacking techniques at a camp in Salman Pak, Iraq. >>
Boston Globe July 10, 2003 Sept. 11 panel discusses possibility of Iraq link Witnesses detail Al Qaeda theories By Bryan Bender Globe Correspondent WASHINGTON -- A terrorism specialist who long has argued that Saddam Hussein was behind terrorist strikes against the United States urged the commission investigating the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks to study possible links between Iraq and the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Members of the bipartisan commission said they would aggressively pursue that controversial line of inquiry as they attempt to trace the history of the shadowy Al Qaeda network to better understand where intelligence agencies fell short in assessing the threat to targets in the United States. One member indicated that the panel has already seen documents that point to a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. ''There is evidence,'' said former Navy secretary John Lehman. ''There is no doubt in my mind that [Iraq] trained them in how to prepare and deliver anthrax and to use terror weapons,'' including teaching operatives hijacking techniques at a camp in Salman Pak, Iraq. In its third public hearing yesterday, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States received testimony from academics and other specialists in a daylong give-and-take designed to answer what commission chairman Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, said Tuesday is a key question to prevent future attacks: ''Where did Al Qaeda come from?'' The Bush administration has previously asserted that there were ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but many terrorism specialists and intelligence officials have publicly questioned the extent to which the radical Islamic cadres of Al Qaeda would have cooperated with Hussein's secular regime. They have also discounted reports that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the spring of 2001. Now, that official, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, is in US custody, and the possible role Iraq played in helping Al Qaeda is receiving fresh scrutiny. The most controversial theory of Iraqi involvement was aired yesterday by Laurie Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who has argued for years that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and subsequent attacks. She contends that at least some of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 plot are not simply members of a ''loose network'' with no ties to state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, she believes their ''legends'' may have been created by Iraqi intelligence following Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to exact revenge for Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War. ''The only party that, reasonably, could have created that legend is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait,'' she said. ''The failure to pursue the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds is a major lapse in the investigation.'' Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged operations chief of Al Qaeda now in US custody, as well as other purported top Al Qaeda planners Abdul Karim and Abdul Monim -- brothers of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef -- have been identified as Kuwaitis. But doubts remain about their true backgrounds, she said. At the time of his capture in Pakistan in March, US intelligence officials had said they only recently learned about Mohammed's connections to Al Qaeda, because he had no ties to the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Alleged Iraqi-Al Qaeda ties were also evident in the 1993 investigation, she said. Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the 1993 attack but still at large, came to the United States from Baghdad and returned there after the bombing. Mohammed Salameh, the Palestinian detained after he returned the Ryder truck that carried the bomb, made dozens of calls to Iraq in less than a month during 1992. Meanwhile, Mylroie said, Yousef's teachers in Britain did not recognize the man accused of the 1993 attack, which killed six people. She also said copies of the passport with the name Abdul Basit Karim, which Yousef used to flee the United States, appear to have been doctored. Others who testified, such as Judith Yaphe, a former CIA analyst who now teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, dismissed Mylroie's theory. ''Iraq's intelligence services did not show exceptional talent or success in long-range, long-time operational planning,'' she said. But Yaphe acknowledged that the Hussein regime was almost ''impossible'' to penetrate. Yaphe said that ''especially on this issue of Iraq and terrorism,'' the commission must attempt to determine not only what the consensus of US spy agencies was throughout the 1990s but also where they could have been wrong -- particularly with new access to Iraqi officials and documents. Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, a former assistant US attorney, also cast doubt on the claims of direct Iraqi involvement, arguing that if it were true, the Bush administration would want to pursue it to further justify the toppling of Hussein. Mylroie countered by saying government officials who don't want to admit such a ''major mistake'' have obstructed any further investigation. Ben-Veniste said the commission ''will hopefully shed light on this in the final report.''
