by Olivier Knox
WASHINGTON, July 19 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said Monday that the United States was investigating whether Iran played any role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, amid CIA skepticism of an official link.
"As to direct connections with September 11, we're digging into the facts to determine if there was one," Bush said as he met with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos in the Oval Office.
His comments came after the acting director of the US Central Intelligence Agency said at least eight of the hijackers who carried out the attacks passed through Iran but that Washington had no proof that Tehran backed the strikes.
"McLaughlin said there was no direct connection between Iran and the attacks of September 11. We will continue to look and see if the Iranians were involved," said Bush.
The US president, who two years ago lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea in an "axis of evil," also urged Tehran to give up its alleged quest for nuclear weapons and cut off any support for groups Washington has branded terrorists.
"They've got to stop funding terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah that create great dangers in parts of the world," said Bush, who branded the Islamic republic a "totalitarian society" with a poor human rights record.
Bush also said Iran, a US-designated state sponsor of terrorism, was "harboring al-Qaeda leadership" and demanded that those members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network be handed over to their country of origin.
And Bush took a hard line on Iran's atomic ambitions, saying: "They've got a nuclear weapons program that they need to dismantle. We're working with other countries to encourage them to do so."
Washington has long dismissed Tehran's contention that it is pursuing a civilian nuclear power program, saying that the oil-rich country is using those efforts as a cover for a weapons program.
McLaughlin's comments on Sunday were the first official confirmation of leaked accounts from the final report of the official inquiry into the 2001 attacks that killed 3,000 people, which is due to be released Thursday.
Iran has said that suspected al-Qaeda members involved in the attacks may have passed through its territory, but insisted they would have done so "illegally".
"We have very long borders and it is impossible to totally control them," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran on Sunday.
"It is natural that five or six people could have crossed our borders illegally without us seeing them," he insisted. "The same thing happens on the border between the United States and Mexico."
Iran condemned the 2001 attacks, but has often been accused of harboring al-Qaeda members. In February, Spain's top anti-terror judge, Baltasar Garzon, alleged that al-Qaeda had a "board of managers" operating in Iran.
Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, have reported that Iran relaxed border controls and provided "clean" passports for the so-called "muscle hijackers" to transit Iran to and from bin Laden's camps between October 2000 and February 2001.
The commission's report says Iran at one point proposed collaborating with al-Qaeda on attacks against America, but bin Laden declined, saying he did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia, according to Time.
Newsweek said the Iranian finding in the commission's report is based largely on a December 2001 memo discovered buried in the files of the US National Security Agency.
The memo, according to Newsweek, says "Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of al-Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from bin Laden's camps through Iran."