(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.

Reply via email to