| CIA: 9/11 Plotters Transited Iran, Govt Tie Unseen
Sun Jul 18, 2:01 PM ET
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About eight of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers passed through Iran before attacking the United States, but there is no sign of official Iranian complicity, the CIA's acting director said on Sunday.
"We have no evidence that there is some sort of official sanction by the government of Iran for this activity. We have no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11," John McLaughlin, acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites), said on 'Fox News Sunday.'
The disclosure that the hijackers transited Iran raises the question of whether the Bush administration has been too focused on Iraq in seeking state connections to the attacks, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said.
"We focused so much energy on Iraq, when other countries may have been more directly linked to 9/11. That should give us pause," Sen. Richard Durbin (news, bio, voting record) of Illinois said on CNN's "Late Edition."
Iran acknowledged some of the 19 Sept. 11 attackers may have passed through illegally, but said it had since tightened border controls. It said any attempts to tie the country to al Qaeda, the militant network which carried out the attacks, were part of U.S. election-year "news propaganda."
U.S. government sources have said a bipartisan commission's report this week on the attacks will say that some hijackers had traveled through Iran on their way to the United States.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Iranian government had ordered its border guards not to stamp the passports of Saudi al Qaeda members moving through Iran after training in Afghanistan. An Iranian stamp could have made the al Qaeda members subject to additional scrutiny upon entering the United States.
Said McLaughlin, "We've known for some time ... I think the count is about eight of the hijackers that were able to pass through Iran at some point in their passage along their operational path."
However, he said, it was not surprising that the hijackers could transit Iran, given what he said was the country's history of supporting terrorism.
'AXIS OF EVIL'
Iran, like Iraq, has been branded by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" that threatens to fuel global terrorism.
But Bush and members of his administration have focused more attention on disputed Iraqi ties to al Qaeda, and cited them in making their case for invading Iraq.
The Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month harshly criticized the U.S. intelligence community for overstating the Iraqi threat of weapons of mass destruction before the war.
A Sept. 11 commission staff report, which is expected to be endorsed in the final report, said there was no evidence that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had a "collaborative relationship" with al Qaeda.
McLaughlin echoed that finding. "What we can't say is that there was some relationship of operational control or command between Saddam and al Qaeda," he said.
However, he said there is credible intelligence of contacts and training exchanges between Iraq and al Qaeda, and that Iraq had provided "some degree" of safe haven al Qaeda members.
Senate Intelligence Committee member Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, said on CNN that Bush "was right to do what we did with Iraq first," but the administration was now "paying a lot of attention to Iran."
McLaughlin also expressed reservations about reports that the Sept. 11 commission would recommend a Cabinet-level agency be created to oversee all U.S. intelligence.
He said "it would be hard to do it without adding an additional layer of bureaucracy." The objective of a stronger intelligence overseer could be met through making "modest changes" to the CIA director's job, he said.
Following the departure of CIA director George Tenet, Bush is considering naming a permanent head of the agency soon, rather than wait until after the U.S. presidential election in November. McLaughlin said he was not "campaigning" for the permanent director's job.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=sto...iran_qaeda_dc_6 | |
