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Lebanon Says U.S. Terror Charges Are Campaign Talk
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
By Joseph Logan
Reuters

Senators who accompanied Graham to Lebanon and Syria alluded to extremist camps in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and the Bekaa Valley, and said a lesson of September 11 was that Washington was slow to deal with such camps in Afghanistan.

BEIRUT -- Reuters
Accusations by U.S. senators that Lebanon harbored extremists' training camps were a "cheap" bid to whip up U.S. votes with anti-terror rhetoric, a government minister said Wednesday.

Senate Intelligence Committee chief Bob Graham, who headed a Senate delegation to Lebanon and Syria last week, said the U.S. war on terror could extend to Hizbollah, which he called "the most vicious and effective terrorist organization in the world."

Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi al-Aridi dismissed as baseless Graham's comments, made Tuesday, and said they seemed intended for the ears of U.S. voters ahead of mid-term elections in November.

"This is for consumption ahead of... the election campaign. He never raised the issue here, nor spoke about it," Aridi told Reuters. "This is a cheap campaign orchestrated at our expense."
(More: The Tallahassee Democrat News Source)
2002 © Reuters, Ltd.

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