(With thanks to Roger Aronoff) NewsMax.com Monday, July 28, 2003 12:49 p.m. EDT Congressional Probers Ignored Evidence of Iraq-9/11 Link
The attorney who won a $64 million federal court judgment just two months ago in a case alleging that Iraq played a significant role in the 9/11 attacks was never contacted by congressional probers who were supposedly investigating the disaster. Attorney James Beasley disputed the 9/11 committee's finding that there was no tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda, telling NewsMax.com on Monday, "There's a ton of stuff" that establishes the connection. Beasley hinted that the selective review may be an attempt by some members of Congress to cover their tracks, explaining, "I'm not really sure what political motivation these guys have ... except that some of them knew about all this stuff before 9/11 and they're the same people who have concluded there's no connection between 9/11 and Iraq." On May 7, Manhattan U.S. District Judge Harold Baer ruled that attorney Beasley and his legal team had presented enough evidence to convince a "reasonable jury" that Iraq played a material role in the deadly attacks. Beasley's evidence included accounts from Czech government officials who continue to insist over CIA objections that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta indeed met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague five months before the attacks. "We talked to the Czech ambassador to the U.S., the guy who kicked out [Iraqi ambassador to the Czech Republic] Ahmad al Ani two weeks after he met with Atta," Beasley told NewsMax. "He's absolutely sure that they met." The Philadelphia attorney also called upon former CIA Director James Woolsey, who testified that he interviewed two terrorist instructors who say they trained radical Islamists at the south Baghdad terrorist training camp, Salman Pak. Their regimen included practice sessions on how to hijack U.S. commercial airliners using the exact methods employed on 9/11. In separate testimony introduced in the case, Sabah Khodada, a Salman Pak instructor who defected to the U.S. in May 2000, said that his first reaction upon learning how the World Trade Center had been destroyed was "This was done by graduates of Salman Pak." Last week, former Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a 9/11 committee member, dismissed out of hand any evidence of a tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda, saying he accepted the denials from Osama bin Laden's camp. "There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by bin Laden's terrorist followers," Cleland told reporters last Wednesday. Sen Jon Corzine, D-N.J., echoed Cleland on Sunday, telling WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg, "There's nothing about any Iraq-al-Qaeda connection in the 9/11 report." Attorney Beasley also told NewsMax that a separate probe by the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks had yet to contact his office.
