Doug Ross @ Journal

Oil-for-Food May Have Funded 9/11 Attacks

In what may be the most shocking news to emerge from the already stunning Oil-for-Food scandal, investigators say that Saddam Hussein bankrolled key al-Qaida players in the late 1990s - a period of time when the terror group was planning the 9/11 attacks and the Iraqi dictator was ripping off billions from the U.N. program. "Saddam had given $300,000 in cash to Ayman Al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's number two man, in the spring of 1998," the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley on Saturday. "It's likely that Saddam was giving some of his [Oil-for-Food] money to al-Qaida." In an eerie coincidence, an October 2001 estimate by the Justice Department put the entire cost of the 9/11 operation at $300,000. While the inception of Iraq's financial relationship with al-Qaida predated the 1996 Oil-for-Food program, the U.N. jackpot enabled Saddam to become much more generous toward his terrorist allies in the years before 9/11. Hayes said the total amount of Iraqi cash funneled into al-Qaida reached into the "millions." ...

Oil-for-Food May Have Funded 9/11 Attacks