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MUSHARRAF: 'Someone Else' Planned U.S. Attacks
Monday, August 5, 2002
By Masood Haider
DAWN

"Right now, I am Chief of Army Staff, Chief Executive, and President. What is power? Power is being Chief Executive. Taking decisions, running the government, undertaking development, running the economy, finance, developing the coastal highway, education. I am making these decisions. I am going to shed that power to the Prime Minister. So what's left? I have to make sure that Pakistan is governed well. Is that unrealistic? I give him full authority. If he does not do well, I will check him."

NEW YORK -- DAWN
President Gen Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with a magazine that he believed that while Osama bin Laden was "sponsor, the financier, and the motivating force" behind the Sept 11 attacks on U.S., "the plan was executed by others."

"I didn't think it possible that Osama sitting up there in the mountains could do it," Musharraf told The New Yorker.

"He was perhaps the sponsor, the financier, the motivating force. But those who executed it were much more modern. They knew the U.S., they knew aviation. I don't think he has the intelligence or the minute planning. The planner was someone else," the General said.

The magazine said Musharraf, whose support for the United States in the war in Afghanistan has earned him the popular nickname Busharraf, talks to Hilton, the interviewer, about all of the tumultuous political events that have occurred since he took power in a coup in 1999.

"You can't do one hundred per cent," Musharraf said. "But I have taken the country out of the morass that it was in. It has been two and a half years of tremendous danger but I can say with satisfaction that my government has done well."
(More: Dawn.com News Source)
2002 © The DAWN Group of Newspapers.

Dan