Saddam Hussein bankrolled key al-Qaida players in the late 1990s ?
Saturday, Dec. 4, 2004 12:07 p.m. EST
Oil-for-Food May Have Funded 9/11 Attacks
In what may be the most shocking news to emerge from the already stunning Oil-for-Food scandal, investigators say that Saddam Hussein bankrolled key al-Qaida players in the late 1990s - a period of time when the terror group was planning the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi dictator was ripping off billions from the U.N. program.
"Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley.
"It's likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil-for-Food] money to al-Qaida."
In an eerie coincidence, an October 2001 estimate by the Justice Department put the entire cost of the 9/11 operation at $300,000.
While the inception of Iraq's financial relationship with al-Qaida predated the 1996 Oil-for-Food program, the U.N. jackpot enabled Saddam to become much more generous toward his terrorist allies in the years before 9/11.
Hayes said the total amount of Iraqi cash funneled into al-Qaida reached into the "millions."
"Saddam had pretty strong ties to bin Laden when bin Laden was in Sudan," he said, based on what a former CIA counterrorism official had told him.
"He talked about this system of Saddam funneling money, usually cash payments, to a variety of al-Qaida-linked Islamic terrorist groups," the Standard reporter said.
Freelance reporter Claudia Rosett, who single-handedly broke the Oil-for-Food story last year, first broached the possibility of a U.N. connection to the 9/11 attacks in the Weekly Standard last August:
"By 1996, remember, bin Laden had been run out of Sudan, and seems to have been out of money. He needed a fresh bundle to rent Afghanistan from the Taliban, train recruits, expand al Qaida's global network, and launch what eventually became the 9/11 attacks.
"Meanwhile," Rosett continued, "over in Iraq about that same time, Saddam Hussein, after a lean stretch under United Nations sanctions, had just cut his Oil-for-Food deal with the U.N., and soon began exploiting that program to embezzle billions meant for relief." |
