The chairman and another member of the Sept. 11 commission said Sunday that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two key U.S. allies in the war on terrorism, had turned a blind eye to Al Qaeda operations and operatives in their countries for years before the terrorist group struck the United States in 2001. Republican commissioner John F. Lehman said on the NBC program "Meet the Press" that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had before Sept. 11 "been paying a kind of blackmail by allowing a kind of free operations" to Islamic radicals affiliated with Al Qaeda, which protected the two nations from attacks within their borders. Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former GOP governor of New Jersey, made similar remarks on the ABC program "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "There’s no question the intelligence services in Pakistan were very much for the Taliban and worked with the Taliban very, very strongly, because they thought that was a help for them in their war with India and then their problems with Iran," Kean said. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda became almost the same organization, Al Qaeda being the military arm, in some ways, of the Taliban."
The Sept. 11 commission staff concluded in a report that the Saudi government didn’t want Bin Laden extradited to their country. And it said it found indications that the Taliban tried to extort money from the Saudi government, with some success.
Kean said the commission concluded that Al Qaeda had stronger ties to other nations than it did to Iraq. "There were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq," he said. The commission did find contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, but concluded that there was "no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks on the United States, in other words, on 9/11." But Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said there were no serious conflicts between the commission and the Bush administration on the issue. Hamilton said there were contacts between Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda, but "there was no collaborative relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, with regard to the 9/11 attacks
. I’ve looked at these statements quite carefully from the administration — they are not claiming that there was a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, with regard to the attacks on the United States." |