U.S.

The Saddam Factor

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

November 8, 2001 / 5:28 PM EST / CBS

After the attacks on America, U.S. officials quickly pinned the blame on Osama bin Laden, his terrorist network, and his Taliban protectors. But some suspect another old enemy might also be involved: Iraq's Saddam Hussein. That possibility is bolstered by new evidence turned up by "Frontline" on PBS, the New York Times and shared with CBS News.

There's still no clear indication that Saddam Hussein played a role in the September 11 attack on America, CBS News Anchor Dan Rather reports, but the shadow of suspicion has grown darker now that Iraqi defectors have emerged saying that Saddam has been training Islamic terrorists at a government-run camp outside Baghdad for several years.

"Training includes hijacking and kidnapping of airplanes, trains, public buses, and planting explosives in cities, sabotaging villages, sabotaging houses, assassinations," said Sabah Khodada, a former Iraqi intelligence service agent.

Armed with a simple sketch of the camp he worked at for eight years, Khodada doesn't know if any followers of Osama bin Laden trained there. But another defector who worked at the camp, a Lieutenant General now in fear for his life, suspects there is an Iraqi connection to the September attacks.

"That was my immediate gut feeling. My feeling is there's a connection," he said.

That's because he saw non-Iraqi Arabs at the camp training for months on the fuselage of a Boeing 707 jetliner.

"I saw them getting trained on this kind of situations where security will not allow you to get weapons into the plane. They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane," explained Khodada.

The FBI and CIA have questioned the defectors and do not believe that any of the September 11 hijackers were trained at the Iraqi camp. But some see mounting circumstantial evidence of an Iraqi connection.

"That's sort of like the elephant in the living room. You can ignore him if you want, but it looks an awful lot like an elephant in the living room -- it looks an awful lot like Iraqi involvement in these attacks on us," said James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA.

Czech authorities confirmed recently that hijacker Mohammed Atta met in Prague last spring with an Iraqi intelligence officer. And Farouk Hijazi, Iraq's former chief of intelligence, reportedly met with bin Laden in 1998 and offered to have him re-base his terrorist operations to Iraq. Is it enough to make the Bush administration widen the war and go after Saddam? Asked today, they wouldn't say.

"I can't comment on any specific information here. Let me just say, the president's made very clear that Iraq remains a threat to American interest, to interest in the region and to Iraq's neighbors and its own people. That was true before September 11th; that's true now," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.