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In Case You Missed It: UANI
Chairman Senator Joseph Lieberman Op-ed in Wall Street Journal on
Iran's Role in 9/11
On
the eve of the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, United Against Nuclear
Iran (UANI) Chairman Joseph I. Lieberman, former U.S. Senator
from Connecticut, detailed Iran's long-time collaboration with the
terrorist group al Qaeda in an op-ed
published on Thursday, September 8 in The Wall Street Journal (see full
text below). Senator Lieberman advises that "the U.S. should not
be rewarding Iran ... with gifts of sanctions relief" while it
is providing support to such a dangerous terrorist organization that
perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
To learn more about Iran-al Qaeda ties, read UANI's
comprehensive report, "Alliance
Against America: Al Qaeda & Iran." Recently updated, the
report provides new details on letters written by Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan revealing al Qaeda's reliance on Iran, as well as Iran's
double game in Syria, supporting the Assad regime while facilitating
the travel of its al Qaeda foes into the country at the same time.
Remember Iran's
Role in 9/11
By Joseph I. Lieberman
The
Wall Street Journal
September 8, 2016
Forgetful officials
should not be rewarding Tehran for its deadly actions with gifts like
sanctions relief.
"Never forget" is the commitment the American people made
after Sept. 11, 2001. Yet sometimes our leaders seem to have
forgotten Iran's role in that worst terror attack on American soil,
and Iran's continuing assistance to terror organizations and
operations around the world.
In the last 15 years, aggressive U.S.-led military and intelligence
operations have killed many of al Qaeda's leaders and damaged the
group's ability to plan and execute a similar attack. But a key al
Qaeda partner, Iran, has never been held responsible for its enabling
role-even though the 9/11 Commission found that "there is strong
evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into
and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were
future 9/11 hijackers."
The State Department says Iran is the world's leading state sponsor
of terrorism. What is not adequately understood, however, is the
regime's willingness to work with extremists of the Sunni sect in the
Arab world and elsewhere-even though it views itself as the vanguard
of the world's Shiite community. Iran is aiding both Sunni and Shiite
terror organizations-including Sunni Hamas and Sunni Islamic Jihad,
and Shiite Hezbollah and Shiite Iraqi militias.
Iran's link to al Qaeda goes back to Sudan in the early 1990s, when
Osama bin Laden lived in the nation's capital, Khartoum. The Sudanese
religious scholar Ahmed Abdel Rahman Hamadabi brought Sheikh Nomani,
an emissary of Iran, to meet bin Laden and the nascent al Qaeda
leadership. According to an account by scholar Rohan Gunaratna,
Sheikh Nomani "had access to the highest echelons of power in
Tehran."
As a result of these consultations, the Washington Institute's
Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson concluded, "Iran and
al-Qaeda reached an informal agreement to cooperate, with Iran
providing critical explosives, intelligence, and security training to
bin Laden's organization." Because Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC) already supported Hezbollah operationally and
financially, a vehicle was in place through which they could support
and influence al Qaeda.
Operating through Hezbollah gave Iran immense freedom to funnel money
and weaponry and to train al Qaeda operatives in deadly tactics that
would be employed around the world, including against the U.S. The
coordinated 1998 truck bombings targeting the U.S. embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania were a direct result of the Iranian terror training,
according to a finding by Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District
Court for the District of Columbia in the 2011 case of James Owens et
al. v. Republic of Sudan et al.
After 9/11, Iran became a more important haven for al Qaeda fighters
who fled from Afghanistan as the Taliban collapsed. Iran claimed that
these terrorists were under "house arrest." In reality,
Iran regularly granted the terrorists freedom to move within Iran and
to cross into Iraq and Afghanistan to carry out attacks. From their
safe base in Iran, al Qaeda members planned terrorist operations,
including the 2003 attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that killed 26
people, including eight Americans, and the 2008 attack on the
American Embassy in Yemen that claimed 16 lives, including six
terrorists.
It took the U.S. government 10 years to publicly acknowledge Iran's
aid to al Qaeda. In 2011, the Treasury Department officially accused
Iran, as a Wall Street Journal report put it, "of forging an
alliance with al Qaeda in a pact that allows the terrorist group to
use Iranian soil as a transit point for moving money, arms and
fighters to its bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
As recently as July 20, 2016, the U.S. blacklisted three members of
al Qaeda who were living in Iran, saying these al Qaeda facilitators
in Iran had helped the jihadist group on the battlefield, with
finance and logistics, and in liaising with Iranian authorities.
Newly declassified letters captured in the May 2011 raid that killed
Osama bin Laden reveal how crucial Iran has been to al Qaeda. In a
2007 letter, bin Laden directed al Qaeda not to target Iran because
"Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and
communication."
Yet even as the U.S. has decried Iran's support for terrorism,
Washington policy makers have pursued closer relations with Tehran.
In the years following reports, court rulings and U.S. government
findings exposing the Iran-al Qaeda alliance, the U.S. led the
countries known as the P5+1 in making a deal with Iran that at best
postpones Iran's nuclear ambitions-while giving them billions of
dollars now, and a legal path to nuclear weapons in the future. We
negotiated with our enemy, the Iranian regime, notwithstanding its
declared and demonstrated desire to destroy our country.
On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. should not be rewarding
Iran for its deadly actions with gifts of sanctions relief, and the
easing of arms embargoes and ballistic-missile restrictions. It is
time to hold the regime accountable for its reckless aggression and
support of terrorism.
Mr. Lieberman, a
former U.S. senator from Connecticut, is chairman of United Against
Nuclear Iran.
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Eye on Iran is a periodic news summary from United
Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) a program of the American Coalition Against
Nuclear Iran, Inc., a tax-exempt organization under Section 501(c)(3)
of the Internal Revenue Code. Eye on Iran is not intended as a
comprehensive media clips summary but rather a selection of media
elements with discreet analysis in a PDA friendly format. For more
information please email press@uani.com.
United Against Nuclear
Iran (UANI) is a non-partisan, broad-based coalition that is united in
a commitment to prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to become a
regional super-power possessing nuclear weapons. UANI is an
issue-based coalition in which each coalition member will have its own
interests as well as the collective goal of advancing an Iran free of
nuclear weapons.
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