Just to pick one of your "we know" items:
• We know that Al Qaeda members used the Salman Pak terrorist training camp.
In reality, we don't know this. Moreover, we can be fairly certain this is FALSE.
<<< Almost immediately after September 11th, the
I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors
who claimed that they had information connecting
Iraq to the attacks. In an interview on October 14,
2001, conducted jointly by the Times and
“Frontline,” the public-television program, Sabah
Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the
September 11th operation “was conducted by
people who were trained by Saddam,” and that
Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art
of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified
only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi
intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed
Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a
Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near
the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
In separate interviews with me, however, a former
C.I.A. station chief and a former military
intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman
Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for
counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties,
Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft.
In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian
extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was
triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the
time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America
favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the
West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6.
The C.I.A. offered similar training in
counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We
were helping our allies everywhere we had a
liaison,” the former station chief told me.
Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an
airplane—which appeared to be used for
counter-terrorism training—when they visited a
biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in
1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of
course, possible for such a camp to be converted
from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A.
official noted, however, that terrorists would not
practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s
Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said.
“They train in basements. You don’t need a real
airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists
went to gyms. But to take one back you have to
practice on the real thing.”
Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on
April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the
former biological facility has yielded evidence to
substantiate the claims made before the war. >>>
newyorker.com |
