Hope Yen, Associated Press  --  Arab News

WASHINGTON, 17 June 2004 — The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported yesterday that Osama Bin Laden met with a top Iraqi official in 1994 but found “no credible evidence” of a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda in attacks against the United States.

In a report based on research and interviews by the commission staff, the panel said that Bin Laden explored possible cooperation with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader’s secular regime.

An Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with Bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and Bin Laden “is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded.”

“There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al-Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship,” the report said. “Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.”

The panel’s findings appear to contradict Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion Monday that Saddam had “long-established ties” with Al-Qaeda.

In making the case for war in Iraq, Bush administration officials frequently cited what they said were Saddam’s decade-long contacts with Al-Qaeda operatives. They stopped short of claiming that Iraq was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but critics say Bush officials left that impression with the American public.

No Saudi Govt Funding Found

The commission found no evidence that the Saudi government funded Al-Qaeda, though the network found “fertile fund-raising ground in the Kingdom.”

“Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al-Qaeda funding, but we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al-Qaeda,” it said.

The commission’s report was released at the beginning of the panel’s final two-day hearing on the development of the Sept. 11 plot and the emergency response by the Federal Aviation Administration and US air defenses.

“We’re going to talk about the evolution of Al-Qaeda and how they moved from one type of organization in the late 1980s to a more fast-acting, poisonous organization in the 1990s, more spread out and dispersed,” Democratic Commissioner Timothy Roemer said before the hearing.

“We’ll be looking at the timeline as to whether or not we had an opportunity to deflect any of the airliners, and how decisions were made by the highest people in government,” he said. In its report, the commission reiterated an oft-repeated warning by the Bush administration, saying Al-Qaeda remains poised to attack the United States in a devastating chemical, biological or “dirty bomb” attack.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the terror group has become much more dispersed, with less funding following the arrests or deaths of key financiers. But the group has learned to operate on much smaller sums than the estimated $30 million spent annually prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the report said.

“Al-Qaeda is actively striving to attack the United States and inflict mass casualties,” the report said. The report noted in particular the group’s “ambitious” biological weapons program and efforts in 1994 to purchase uranium.

“Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups will likely continue to exploit leaks of national security information in the media, open-source information on techniques such as mixing explosives, and advances in electronics,” it said. In the preliminary report, the commission points to a series of attacks on the US or its allies as early as 1992 that US intelligence would determine by the late 1990s were linked to Bin Laden or his group.

They included a December 1992 explosion outside two hotels in Aden, Yemen; the October 1993 killing of 18 US soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia; a November 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and the June 1996 explosion at the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden’s ties to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a failed plot to blow up commercial aircraft in 1994 in Manila, Philippines, are unclear, but they offered significant warning signs that terrorists were intent on demolishing American symbols and inflicting mass casualties, the panel said.

“What is clear is that these plots were major benchmarks in the evolving terrorist threat to the United States and foreshadowed later attacks that were indisputably carried out by Al-Qaeda under Bin Laden’s direction,” the report stated.