Pence says Iran’s Qasem Soleimani aided 9/11 hijackers. Experts say that’s not true
Jan 4, 2020
In a Friday Twitter post, Vice President Mike Pence claimed top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani assisted the 9/11 hijackers in traveling to Afghanistan.
In a thread laying out Soleimani’s “worst atrocities,” Pence included how Soleimani “assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.”
Links between Soleimani and the 9/11 attacks have not been proven, as experts noted.
Daniel Byman, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a staff member on the 9/11 Commission, told USA TODAY, “To my knowledge, there’s no evidence Soleimani was directly running the 9/11 operatives that were transiting Iran.”
Although there were links between Al Qaeda and Iran, it was “not true” that Iran was behind the 9/11 attacks, Byman said.
As the bipartisan report from the 9/11 Commission concluded, “We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.”
