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Dave[_18_] · September 13th 08, 03:02 PM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

wrote:
Iran’s Role in 9/11 Attack

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 7:56 PM

By: Kenneth R. Timmerman

In an auspicious passage that went virtually unreported at the time,
the 9/11 Commission revealed in July 2004 that they “now have evidence
suggesting that 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled
into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.”

The “muscle” operatives were the 9/11 hijackers who overpowered
airline crew members, slit their throats, and terrorized passengers so
the al-Qaida pilots could seize control of the airliners and fly them
into their targets.

The Commissioners concluded that there was “strong evidence that Iran
facilitated the transit of al-Qaida members into and out of
Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11
hijackers.”

“We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S.
government,” the Commissioners wrote.

This heavily-redacted passage in the July 2004 final report of the
9/11 Commission provided a tantalizing glimpse into the information
gathered by the U.S. intelligence community — mainly from national
technical means — on Iran’s material involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, until now it has been widely ignored by the intelligence
community, Congress, and most of the press.

I first revealed the inside story of what the 9/11 Commission found
out about Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 plot in my 2005 book
Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Among other things, I discovered from sources on the Commission that
the “senior Hezbollah operative” who accompanied the al-Qaida muscle
hijackers on flights from Saudi Arabia and Beirut to Tehran was none
other than Iran’s star terrorist, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

Either Mugniyeh’s presence on those flights was hard evidence that
Iran was actively and materially involved with the future al-Qaida
terrorists, or it was a “remarkable coincidence,” the 9/11 Commission
report stated.

[Editor's Note: Read “Iran’s Arch-Terror Master Killed in Syria” ].

I also interviewed a former Revolutionary Guards Colonel who gave
paramilitary and intelligence training to al-Qaida terrorists at a
specialized training camp in Iran before 9/11.

Former FBI assistant director Oliver “Buck” Revell tracked Mugniyeh
during the 1980s because of his involvement in the deadly bombings of
the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, among other
attacks.

“Mugniyeh is more dangerous and has killed more people and tortured
more people than any other terrorist,” Revell told me earlier this
year.

“Whenever he’s under pressure, he goes to Iran. He’s the creature of
the IRGC [the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps]. He’s the international
link between Hezbollah and the IRGC.”

Not long after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage called Mugniyeh’s Hezbollah “the A-Team of terrorists, and
maybe al-Qaida is actually the 'B' team.”

Armitage never accused Hezbollah or Mugniyeh of involvement in the
attacks, but was referring to their twenty-five-year history of
killing Americans.

Mugniyeh was assassinated on February 12, 2008, when he turned on the
ignition of his Mitsubishi Pajero in a highly-secure neighborhood of
Damascus, Syria. He had just left a meeting with the head of Syrian
intelligence, Rostam Ghazali, and with a senior Iranian intelligence
officer.

Most commentators speculated that Mugniyeh had been assassinated by
the Israelis, because of his ongoing role as Hezbollah’s military
chief. But a Newsmax source close to Hezbollah speculated that he had
been killed by the Iranians.

“Haj Radwan [a nom de guerre for Mugniyeh] knew too much, and had
outlived his usefulness to the Iranians,” the source said.

New York Times reporter Philip Shenon also examined Iran’s involvement
in the 9/11 plot in his recent book, The Commission, which details the
political infighting among the staff and commissioners as they debated
whether to apportion blame between the Clinton and Bush
administrations for missing the signs of the impending attacks.

But Shenon — like the published 9/11 commission report itself — falls
short of naming Imad Mugniyeh as the “senior Hezbollah operative” who
was Iran’s liaison with al-Qaida.

A senior member of the 9/11 Commission staff confirmed this
information to me again just a few months ago. “You mean, someone
doesn’t know it was Mugniyeh?” he told me.

Despite the Commission’s calls for “further investigation” into Iran’s
role in the 9/11 attacks, no agency of the United States government
has delved into this subject in the four years since the report was
published.

The boxes of highly-classified documents detailing what the
intelligence community learned about Iran’s involvement with al Qaeda
— many of which were identified in footnotes to the pages of the
report dealing with Iran — were returned to their originating agencies
once the Commission completed its work, where they have been forgotten
like an old aunt dying of dementia.

Imad Mugniyeh’s ties to al-Qaida go back at least to 1993, according
to Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Ali Mohamed.

Mohamed, an Egyptian special forces officer who came to America in the
1980s and enlisted in the U.S. Army, was later considered a
“confidential informant” by the FBI as they were investigating the
first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

FBI CI's are usually total bull****. They are notorious liars.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004...sa.september11