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Politics : Foreign Affairs - No Political Rants -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (416)	3/8/2003 8:16:34 PM
From: lorne	Respond to of 504

CIA's Woolsey Tells Court: Iraq Involved in 9/11 Friday, March 7, 2003 Former CIA Director James Woolsey offered bombshell testimony this week in a lawsuit brought by the families of World Trade Center victims that implicates Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks. The one-time Clinton administration intelligence chief described what he said was a conspiracy between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. As evidence he offered accounts from Iraqi defectors who have described a Boeing 707 jet parked on the ground at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak. The plane, the eyewitnesses insist, was used as a hijacking school prior to 9/11. Since 1995 Saddam's most elite terror operatives had allegedly used Salman Pak to train al-Qaeda recruits to overcome U.S. flight crews using methods employed on 9/11, according to London's Observer newspaper. In November 2001, dozens of other reports, including several in the New York Times, covered news of Saddam's Salman Pak hijacking school based on the defectors' accounts. "I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge between [al-Qaeda and Iraq] was involved here," Woolsey told a Manhattan federal court on Monday, according to the New York Daily News. He compared the relationship between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terror network to two Mafia families "who hate each other, kill each other from time to time but are still capable of working together against a common enemy," according to testimony quoted by the Associated Press. At the very least, Saddam Hussein is guilty of aiding and abetting the activities of al-Qaeda, Woolsey contended. He also offered evidence suggesting that Baghdad had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. A July 21, 2001, article in an Egyptian newspaper, headlined "America, an Obsession with Osama bin Laden," indicated that Baghdad knew what was coming less than months later, the former U.S. intelligence chief told the court. The report, written by an Iraqi, predicted bin Laden would target both New York City and the Pentagon. Woolsey noted a line in the story warning that bin Laden would "strike America on the arm that is already hurting," explaining that the phrase was likely a reference to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. No Iraqi journalist would write such a report without his government's knowledge and approval, Woolsey testified. newsmax.com