Terrorist training camps in Iraq
mediamatters.org
As recently as April 3, in a Standard article headlined "Camp Saddam," Hayes cited U.S. intelligence reports based on interrogations of a detainee held at the Pentagon's detention facility at Guantánamo Bay to suggest that the training camp at Salman Pak in Iraq may have harbored members of Al Qaeda before the war. However, the September 8 Senate report concluded that "[p]ostwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq."
Further, news reports published after the invasion noted that no evidence had been found to support that conclusion. The New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh reported in an article for the May 12, 2003, issue of the magazine that, according to former intelligence officials, "Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training" in the 1980s with U.S. support. On March 2, 2004, Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay, and John Walcott of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reported that "Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility."
Meeting in Prague
In an article for the June 28, 2004, issue of the Standard, Hayes questioned whether the 9-11 Commission report, scheduled for release later that summer, would "credibly address" evidence of a purported April 2001 meeting between 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer. Hayes had previously acknowledged in an article for the November 24, 2003, edition of the Standard that "[e]ven some of the most hawkish Bush administration officials are privately skeptical that Atta met [Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani, the Iraq intelligence chief in Prague] on that occasion." After the Commission released its report, concluding that the meeting had not taken place, Hayes observed in an article for the August 2, 2004, issue of the Standard, "The commission doesn't reveal how it knows this, and given its credulous reporting of al Ani's denial of the meeting, one hopes this account of al Ani's whereabouts did not come from the Iraqi intelligence officer himself. Still, the commission's decision to address the question of the Prague meeting directly is admirable." Hayes did not mention the purported meeting in his subsequent Standard articles.
However, as Media Matters noted, on the December 9, 2005, edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, Hayes defended Cheney's claim during a December 9, 2001, Meet the Press interview that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, by saying, "If you look at the front page of The New York Times in the days surrounding the vice president's claim, The New York Times was reporting the same thing." But Hayes ignored the fact that Cheney continued to make that claim even after the Times and numerous other major news outlets had determined that no evidence existed to substantiate it. |
