TEHRAN, 19 July 2004 — Iran acknowledged yesterday that suspected Al-Qaeda members involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks may have passed through its territory, but insisted they would have done so "illegally".
Illegally, my ass. The only reason they are admitting now to having them in their territory, is because they now realize that the State Department knows more about their goings than they thought.
"We have very long borders and it is impossible to totally control them," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. "It is natural that five of six people could have crossed our borders illegally without us seeing them," he insisted. "The same thing happens on the border between the United States and Mexico."
Asefi was responding to the Sept. 11 commission report, due out Thursday in the United States, which according to US media reports alleges that Iran may have helped in the attacks by providing eight to 10 Al-Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan.
But John McLaughlin, the acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told Fox News yesterday Washington has no evidence that Tehran sanctioned the Sept. 11 strikes. "We have ample evidence of people being able to move back and forth across that terrain," McLaughlin said. "However, I would stop there and say we have no evidence that there is some sort of official sanction by the government of Iran for this activity. We have no evidence that there is some sort of official connection between Iran and 9/11," he said.
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