Did Bush Blow It by Ignoring Salman Pak?
Tuesday Sept. 17, 2002; 11:33 a.m. EDT
newsmax.com
Did the White House make a mistake by not presenting the U.N. last week with compelling evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in 9-11?
That's the question Bush administration supporters must ponder, now that the usual media suspects have begun to urge the president to declare victory with Iraq's agreement to allow the return of inspection teams and instead concentrate on al Qaeda - as if the two were wholly different issues.
"Iraq's offer yesterday to allow United Nations weapons inspectors back to Baghdad without conditions could open the way to resolving the crisis peacefully," the New York Times intoned Tuesday morning.
In the same editorial the paper complained, "there is little evidence to suggest that [Saddam] and Al Qaeda are allies."
Hussein's decision to call Bush's bluff by welcoming the inspectors back was entirely predictable. And though the president never expressly hinged a decision to go to war on Iraq's refusal to comply with inspections, U.S. allies - not to mention Democratic party critics - are sure to seize on the development to press Bush to back off.
But imagine if the president had gone before the U.N. last week and argued that the U.S. was compelled to attack Iraq not merely because Saddam was developing nuclear weapons, but because of startling evidence that he was directly involved in training al Qaeda terrorists in the kind of hijacking tactics first employed on 9-11 - and seen nowhere else before or since.
Bush could have dared the U.N. to hear the accounts of graduates from Saddam's hijacking school at Baghdad's Salman Pak camp, including the account of a former colonel with the Iraqi intelligence service Mukhabarat who has already been debriefed by the FBI and CIA.
Even if the president revealed no more information about the Saddam's hijack school beyond what has already been reported by the London Observer and the European Wall Street Journal, the case for retribution would be hard to dismiss.
According to those reports, the Salman Pak terrorist training camp featured:
• A Boeing 707 used since 1995 to rehearse 9-11-style hijack operations. The plane is parked far from any regular airfield, according U.N. weapons inspectors who have confirmed its existence.
• A hijack training curriculum that specialized in instruction on how to overcome U.S. flight crews in groups of four or five armed only with small knives - a technique never employed before 9-11.
• An elite group of hijacking recruits known as "Saddam's Fedayheen" (Saddam's bodyguards), who trained separately from other terrorists and were dedicated Muslim radicals who interrupted their hijacking lessons only to pray to Allah five times a day.
• A curriculum steeped in hatred for America that included the ultimate goal of attacking "installations important to the United States," according to one defector.
• A student body made up of non-Iraqi recruits from throughout the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco.
• Iraq's own admission that hijacking rehearsals are taking place at Salman Pak, though, Baghdad officials claim, they're part of "counter-terrorism training."
• Satellite photos that confirm the existence of Saddam's hijack classroom, the parked Boeing 707.
Is there smoking gun evidence that the 9-11 hijackers trained at Salman Pak? Not yet.
But as Bush might have argued to the U.N. last week: Where else in the world has a known state sponsor of terrorism set up a veritable hijack university to teach al Qaeda recruits the exact same techniques employed in the attack on America?
It may not be too late to make the case. Next week British Prime Minster Tony Blair is scheduled to release his own dossier on Saddam, which reportedly ties several known al Qaeda terrorists to Iraqi terror facilities.
If Blair's evidence includes new details about the role played in 9-11 by Saddam's Salman Pak hijack school, Kofi Annan had best tell his weapons inspectors to stay home. |
