Ahmadinejad calls Obama reaction to 9/11 comments ‘amateurish’

TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Saturday described the reaction by Barack Obama to his remarks on the Sep 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “amateurish”.

Ahmadinejad had caused widespread outrage in his speech Thursday to the UN General Assembly by claiming that some “segments” of the US government “orchestrated” 9/11 to “reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime”.

He also called on formation of a fact-finding team to investigate all dimensions of the incident.

In an interview with the BBC Persian TV Friday, Obama described as “hateful” and “offensive” the comments by Ahmadinejad, especially as he made the statement “in Manhattan, just a little north of Ground Zero, where families lost their loved ones”.

“The reaction (by Obama) was very amateurish as if there is nothing to hide, so just present the relevant documents to the fact-finding team so that we all together fight against the involved terrorists,” Ahmadinejad told reporters upon his arrival in Tehran from New York.

“I just raised one simple question and it is not right that whoever poses a question is insulted afterwards,” he said.

The Iranian president once again said the 9/11 incident has been used against muslims around the world, and used as a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

“We should not allow this incident to be turned into a holy and untouchable issue again,” Ahmadinejad said - a reference to the Holocaust which the Iranian president considers as a pretext for Israel to occupy Palestine and suppress Palestinians.

“Let us open the black box of 9/11 as the US cannot raise a claim and issue a one-sided verdict and based upon that, dictate its policies on other countries and accuse any state opposing the US version of terrorism,” he added.

Ahmadinejad had said in a news conference Friday that his remarks were not meant to hurt the American peoples’ feelings but to show that the US government used the tragedy to kill “tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan”.

Asked whether he should apologize for the remarks in the General Assembly, Ahmadinejad shot back: “Why should it be a bad statement? We have expressed our sympathies to those killed in 9/11. We must find the root causes of 9/11.”

Nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11, including more than 2,700 in New York when two hijacked planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Iran’s state television said in a commentary that there was a “media competition” between Ahmadinejad and Obama in New York which “Ahmadinejad clearly won and even the interview with BBC Persian programme could not save Obama”.

Since his arrival on Monday, Ahmadinejad held several exclusive interviews with US media with the aim to clarify the Iranian stance to the American public.