Talk:Farouk Hijazi/Comments

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ANALYSIS: THOUGH AFGHANISTAN HAS PROVIDED OSAMA BIN LADEN WITH SANCTUARY, IT IS UNCLEAR WHERE HE IS NOW

National Public Radio (NPR) February 18, 1999 10:00 AM Eastern Time, MORNING EDITION

- PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT -

Mr. VINCENT CANNISTRARO (Former Chief of CIA Counterterrorism Operations): Farouk Hijazi, who was the Iraqi ambassador in Turkey, went to Afghanistan in December with the knowledge of the Taliban and met with Osama bin Laden. It's known through a variety of intelligence reports that the US has, but it's also known through sources in Afghanistan, members of Osama's entourage let it be known that the meeting had taken place.

MIKE SHUSTER: Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one US government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There is a wide gap between bin Laden's fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. But some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.

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