NewsMax.com Monday June 23, 2003; 12:18 a.m. EDT Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey: Bush Needs to Pursue Iraq's 9/11 Role
Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Friday that President Bush needs to vigorously pursue all the available evidence indicating that Iraq played a role in both the 9/11 attacks and the plot to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. "The [Bush] administration hasn't really pushed hard, I think, to uncover these various bits of evidence that may point to some types of links on some issues between al Qaeda and Iraq," Woolsey told WLIE-NY radio host Mike Siegel. "And all of those deserve to be pursued vigorously." The ex-CIA chief, who served under President Clinton from 1993 to 1995, explained, "It seems to me that it is important that the Iraqis were training not only their own thugs but also Islamists from other countries quite secretly at Salman Pak for years in aircraft hijacking." And while evidence tying the 9/11 hijackers directly to the South Baghdad terrorist training camp has yet to surface, Woolsey noted, "That doesn't mean it's not relevant. Conceivably people who trained them were trained there. Or tactics were developed [there] which were passed on." Woolsey noted that evidence of Iraq's involvement in plans to take out the Twin Towers goes back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. "The two lead bombers, the two smart guys who were supposed to escape and did in the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center - one was an Iraqi [who] also had American citizenship," the intelligence chief told WLIE. "His name is [Abdul Rahman] Yasin and he fled back to Iraq and was under the protection of the Iraqi government there for years." Yasin's World Trade Center Bombing partner, Ramzi Yousef, entered the U.S. with an Iraqi passport, Woolsey noted. When Yousef's Manila apartment was raided by Philippine police in 1995, investigators discovered plans on his laptop computer to plant bombs on twelve U.S. airliners and blow them up over the Pacific. Dubbed by prosecutors "The Manila Air Plot," an alternative plan called for Yousef to hijack the planes and crash them into U.S. landmarks like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Former U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District Mary Jo White, who prosecuted the case, revealed that Yousef had warned U.S. investigators that compatriots were ready to pick up where he left off. "One of the most chilling facts that came out during the Manila Air trial was part of the statement Ramzi Yousef gave to the FBI and the Secret Service on the plane bringing Yousef back from Pakistan where he had been apprehended," White revealed just six months before the 9/11 attacks. "According to Yousef, there were still trained confederates of his who could and would carry out the planned bombings of American airliners." Publicly, at least, the Bush administration has given no indication that it has pressed Yousef for more information on Iraq's role in his plot to destroy the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers/Manila Air Plot bomber is now serving a life sentence in a "supermax" maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado. But Woolsey said that Yousef's partner, Yasin, should also be targeted. "If we can capture Yasin, now that we are in Iraq, we may be able to get some better information about what happened in '93," the ex-CIA chief advised. "There were enough connections [between al Qaeda] and Iraq and Iraqi intelligence that we ought to be looking at this very hard, as we capture files and people and hard disk drives in Iraq and so on, and see what we can turn up," Woolsey urged.
