Sunni-Shi’ite cooperation is unusual, but not unheard of. It indicates how determined the Islamic world is in this struggle that we still dare not name. Of course, this, like everything from the 9/11 Commission, is craven and politically motivated, but there is still useful information here. From the New York Times:
The final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will offer new evidence of cooperative ties between Iran and Al Qaeda, including information drawn from intelligence reports suggesting that Iran provided several of the hijackers with safe passage in the year before the attacks, government officials said yesterday.
The officials emphasized that the commission had no evidence to suggest that Iranian officials knew of the Sept. 11 plot. But they said the evidence raised new questions about why the Bush administration focused on the possibility of Iraqi ties to Osama bin Laden’s terror network after Sept. 11, 2001, when there may have been far more extensive evidence of an Iranian connection.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the embargo placed by the commission on discussing the report until its release, said the panel had recently obtained intelligence showing that Iran had ordered guards at its border stations not to stamp the passports of Qaeda members from Saudi Arabia who were moving through Iran after training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The existence of the new intelligence was first reported on Time magazine’s Web site.
The officials said the bipartisan commission had uncovered evidence that as many as 10 of the Sept. 11 hijackers traveled through Iran in late 2000 and early 2001 and would have benefited from the Iranian policy, allowing them to enter the United States without an Iranian passport stamp, which could have made them subject to special scrutiny.