911 STATE SPONSORSHIP QUOTES

Mr. JAMES WOOLSEY (Former CIA Director):

Well, one thing that's gone wrong, Peter, I think, is that for some years now we have adopted a theory that terrorism first was likely just to be sort of a pick-up team, these loose associations of terrorists inspired, say, by the blind sheik in New York. This was the thought on the two bombings, one attempted, one real in New York back in the early '90's. And then the Clinton administration veered off into saying everything looked like it might be Osama bin Laden. It's important that we realize there is a real possibility, when you have something this devastating and well-coordinated, that THERE COULD BE STATE ACTION OF SOME SORT BEHIND IT.

Gary Sick” Director of Middle East Institute at Columbia University

"Mr. SICK: Suicide pilots, but pilots who were qualified to fly a major airplane, and I personally watched the second plane go into the trade towers and there was no flinching and no swerving; he flew right straight into it. And it was clear that no American pilot--no commercial pilot would ever have done that.

And you stop and think about the amount of time--back it up--how much time was--would have been required and the money and the organization. Let's put it this way: What if you're the president in the Cold War days, and you tell the CIA that you'd like to create a little operation in Russia, which would basically hijack four airplanes, and within a period of an hour, crash them into major sites in the Soviet Union, and you had to organize that. It would have stretched our capabilities absolutely to the limit. And yet that's what happened here today.

Mike Ackerman, head of a Miami-based security firm and a retired CIA agent:
"This is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that we've seen before. The only small comfort we can take is that it's not nuclear, not biological, not chemical weapons," Ackerman added.

"I'm sitting here in shock, and I've been dealing with this for 30 years. It stretches the imagination that even Osama bin Laden, a renegade Saudi millionaire blamed for other terrorist actions,
could do this. It begs the question of state sponsorship." 

Bernard Schecterman, professor emeritus of international
relations and Middle East studies at the University of Miami:
To penetrate airport security, for example, the terrorists probably relied on "sleepers," operatives sent to America two or

three years ago to get jobs as airport employees.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher:

"I think it may well be state-supported terrorism in some way. The pattern here is for the terrorist to do their plotting in one country, carry out their act in a second country and then flee to a third country. And what I hope for in this situation, that we will not do what we did in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, and that is just focus on the immediate perpetrators -- that we go deeper, drill down and find out who actually was behind this."

Sen. EDWARDS

Sen. EDWARDS: I think when--whenever we see the kind of attack we saw on the United States to--today, certainly if it were state sponsored it would be war. And I think we should treat it as an act of war.

Senator McCain:

But I--I'm--to be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that a--an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I d--I just never did. But I don't think there's any doubt that there are countries--Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others--who we know engage in proliferation of--of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.

R.P. Eddy former National Security Council Member:

I would bet dollars to doughnuts that we're going to find that whoever did do this did have state sponsorship of one degree or another.

Judith Miller Terrorism Expert: Well, I think we used to think that only a state could do something like what we saw today.

Tom Oliphant

Tom Oliphant: So it is not clear how much the people will be told today, but there is no question in my mind that particularly on this trigger of any state sponsorship, that no more tolerance probably means thinking about military responses against countries.

Mr. JOHN PARACHINI (Monterey Institute)

John Parachini is with us. He's the executive director of the Washington office of the Monterey Institute. He's writing a book about Osama bin Laden. He is the author of a report on the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Mr. Parachini, first of all, what do you think about the notion that this act was so sophisticated that it might actually have been state sponsored?

Mr. JOHN PARACHINI (Monterey Institute): I think it's a good point, and it's worth thinking about.

TERRORIST EXPERT Dr. Eliot Cohen:

I would also fall back on the issue of state sponsorship. These groups simply cannot function unless they have places that they can go where they will be sheltered by the institutions of the state. In the past, Syria and Iran have been two of the leading offenders; of, course, Iraq as well. Without some kind of state protection, it's very, very hard for these organizations to ...(unintelligible). So it's going to be a question of going both after the organizations but also going really hard after the states. We've been rather unwilling in recent years to talk about countries as sponsors of state terrorism or facilitators. But that's what a number of them are and we're going to need to turn the spotlight on them. Again, I'd stress there's a difference between crime and war, and this is war.

Jurgen Storbeck, the director of Europol:
He cautioned against jumping to conclusions before the mass of evidence had been properly sifted. In an interview with The Telegraph, he said: "Bin Laden is not the automatic leader of every terrorist act carried out in the name of Islam. "It's possible that he was informed about the operation; it's even possible that he influenced it; but he's probably not the man who steered every action or controlled the detailed plan.
"As for the idea that, sitting in Afghanistan, he could have controlled the last phase of the operation is something we
should not accept without a lot of doubt." He added: "If one wants to avoid error, one must ensure that the investigation has a wide scope." This suggests that the German authorities are highly skeptical about bin Laden's role and may have uncovered evidence
pointing in a different direction. He refused to speculate on which groups might be responsible, saying "There are a lot of people with the same philosophy who may have been to bin Laden's training camps, but are not necessarily under his orders." He said Europol was giving serious consideration to claims that there was some form of state-sponsorship involved, but said there was no hard evidence to date. Europol tracks Islamic fundamentalists, drawing on sensitive information provided by all EU states as well as tip-offs from allies such as Japan, Canada and Switzerland.