Monday, July 19, 2004
That's I-R-A-.... is that supposed to be an "N" or a "Q"?
The Iranian frontier with Afghanistan is a wild and desolate area of goat farmers and mud-brick huts, the perfect place for illicit opium—and terrorists—to cross the border. But the region is hardly a no man's land. U.S. intelligence believes that in faraway Tehran, the hard-line Islamist clerics who now exercise near total control over Iran directed their border guards to help jihadists coming from Afghanistan. And sometime between October 2000 and February 2001, according to the forthcoming final report of the 9-11 Commission, eight to 10 of the "muscle" hijackers of the September 11 plot were among those who benefited from this Iranian good-fellowship.
That conclusion—the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda—is one of the most surprising findings to emerge in the commission's report, which is due out this week. According to a December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, obtained by the commission, Iranian officials instructed their border inspectors not to place Iranian or Afghan stamps in the passports of Saudi terrorists traveling from Osama bin Laden's training camps through Iran. Such "clean" passports undoubtedly helped the 9/11 terrorists pass into the United States without raising alarms among U.S. Customs and visa officials, sources familiar with the report told NEWSWEEK.
The 9-11 Commission report emphasizes there is no evidence suggesting that Iranian officials had advance knowledge of the September 11 plot. Still, the report raises new, sharper questions about whether the Bush administration was focused on the right enemy when it decided to remove Saddam Hussein. The NSA memo adds to a large accumulation of intelligence indicating that Iran has had more suspicious ties to Al Qaeda than Iraq did. Among those who once had a base in Iran: Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, allegedly the No. 1 terrorist in Iraq today. Meanwhile the commission found there was no "collaborative, operational" relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Story.
posted by chris at 5:11 PM
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