Did Iran Shelter Bin Laden?
A team of individuals including former special forces operatives planned to capture Osama bin Laden while he was being protected in Iranian territory, according to one of the people involved. Kenneth R. Timmerman, writing for Newsmax.com, reports that the group planned to capture the infamous terrorist two years ago during a falcon hunt in northeastern Iran. However, United States government agencies put a stop to the plan citing the Neutrality Act and failed to act on the information.
Timmerman says that Iran providing safe haven to bin Laden is characteristic of its long history of reaching across the sectarian divide to work with Sunni and Wahhabi terrorists who would otherwise be enemies, such as Sunni terrorist group Hamas. Contrary to general public perception, Iran’s “support for al Qaeda is also notorious in intelligence circles,” Timmerman says. He continues:
The 9/11 Commission staff discovered 75 highly classified U.S. intelligence documents detailing Iran’s support for al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks and revealed that “8 to 10 of the Saudi ‘muscle’ hijackers traveled into or out of Iran” in the months leading up to the attacks. Iranian intelligence officers handled them in that country.
Iran’s cooperation with al Qaeda began in 1993, when Tehran sent a Revolutionary Guards general and a top terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, to meet with Osama bin Laden in the Sudan. Information about the meeting was made public during an October 2000 court hearing in New York. Following the meetings in Sudan, bin Laden started sending al Qaeda terrorists to Hezbollah camps in Lebanon and to Revolutionary Guards training camps in Iran, according to trial testimony by bin Laden’s former bodyguard, Ali Mohammad. Bin Laden’s eldest son, Saad, traveled to Iran in May 2001 to coordinate details of the 9/11 attacks with top Iranian leaders, according to a former Iranian intelligence officer tasked with his personal protection at the time. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the younger bin Laden sought refuge in Iran and is believed to have remained there ever since. The United States believes that Saad “has been in some form of custody for years in Iran,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told reporters this January.
Because of this, Alan Parrot, one of those involved in the 2007 plot to kidnap bin Laden, believes that the U.S. does not actually want to seize the mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks. Timmerman says the reason for this is that “he would reveal the fact that he has been sheltered by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran since at least 2004, complicating efforts by the Bush and Obama administrations to reach a diplomatic compromise with Tehran.”
Back in July 2007, when the National Intelligence Estimate revealed that one of the two known leadership “councils” of al Qaeda meets in Iran, theTrumpet.com wrote: “Thus far, the U.S. has failed to confront Iran on all the proxy wars it is waging in the region. We expect the U.S. to respond no differently to Iran’s support of al Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. is likely to respond with intensified negotiations rather than confrontation.”
As time goes on, it is increasingly evident that Washington prefers the option of negotiation rather than confrontation when it comes to terrorism and state sponsorship of terrorism.
TheTrumpet.com has repeatedly detailed how Iran is the head of the terrorist snake, and that America’s failure to confront it directly has been the greatest strategic flaw of its war on terror. We have also pointed out that Iran has consistently supported both sides of the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan in order to tie down the U.S. and establish itself as the dominant power in the region. Read “The Head of the Snake” for the Trumpet’s prediction of how the war on terrorism will end.