Posted on 09/27/2002 9:21:39 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Clinton-era holdovers still running the CIA have dismissed the best evidence that Saddam Hussein had a role in planning the 9/11 attacks because they distrust accounts from multiple Iraqi defectors who have described an airplane hijack training school attended by al Qaeda members near Baghdad.
According to this week's New Republic magazine, "two former Iraqi intelligence officers" brought to the CIA by the Iraqi opposition group the Iraqi National Congress (INC) have provided classified testimony claiming "that Saddam was using a base south of Baghdad, in an agricultural community called Salman Pak, to train non-Iraqi Arabs in hijacking and other black arts of terrorism."
The "Agency," however - still run by Clinton appointee George Tenet - remains unconvinced. "There is not evidence of Al Qaeda training there in Salman Pak," one senior CIA official insisted to TNR.
The Agency's antipathy toward intelligence provided by INC defectors "dates back to Clinton-era efforts to topple Saddam," the magazine said, when agency officials began to suspect that an INC leader torpedoed a planned coup against Saddam because it was spearheaded by a rival dissident group.
Still, despite the CIA's stubbornness on Salman Pak, administration hard-liners, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, are said to be taking the defectors' accounts seriously.
Though senior administration officials have yet to publicly include the details about the reputed Iraqi-al Qaeda operation in their arguments for attacking Baghdad, previous reports in the London Observer, the European Wall Street Journal and even the New York Times paint a compelling picture.
The evidence of a Salman Pak-9/11 link includes:
• A Boeing 707 used since 1995 to rehearse 9/11-style hijack dress rehearsals. The plane is parked far from any regular airfield, according to 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 hijackers 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.
• Satellite photos that confirm the existence of Saddam's hijack classroom, the parked Boeing 707.
• Iraq's own admission that hijacking rehearsals are taking place at Salman Pak, though, Baghdad officials claim, they're part of "counter-terrorism training."
Reports that the CIA refuses to take the Salman Pak story seriously are not new. Six weeks after the 9/11 attacks Newsweek reported, "When anti-Saddam Iraqis told U.S. officials as recently as two weeks ago of a defector with information about 'terrorist training' operations at Salman Pak, the CIA officer on the case was openly dismissive."
In fact, former CIA Director James Woolsey, a Salman Pak believer, has complained openly about the agency's disdain for INC-supplied intelligence. As a private citizen Woolsey worked to bring one of the Salman Pak defectors to the attention of CIA officials. But he said that the agency's interrogation of his Salman Pak source was a joke. "Their principal interest seemed to be not his links to Al Qaeda but what his ties were to the INC," Woolsey told the TNR.
The CIA's blindered approach to Iraqi intelligence seems to mirror the FBI's botched probe into last fall's anthrax attacks, where bureau officials repeated leaked information to the press suggesting that the perpetrator likely had ties to some homegrown right wing terror organization - always favorite target during the Clinton administration.
Even after credible reports emerged that two of the 9-11 hijackers had showed up at Florida medical facilities with what looked like anthrax rashes on their hands and legs, the FBI continued to point fingers away from any 9/11 connection.
Last month, armed with evidence that looks a whole lot less compelling than the hijackers' apparent anthrax sickness, the FBI named Maryland bioweapons expert Dr. Stephen Hatfill as "a person of interest" in their anthrax probe.
But with the debate over Iraq supplanting concerns about anthrax, many wonder why Bush hasn't invoked the Salman Pak story as the trump card that could end acrimonious finger pointing on Capitol Hill over "politicizing the war."
One reason might be his reluctance to embarrass the CIA, an agency where Bush family connections still run deep. Bush's father, after all, ran the Agency for the last year of the Ford administration.
Those ties seemed to play a role in the president's decision to visit CIA headquarters within days of the 9/11 attacks to reassure agency officials and employees that he didn't hold them responsible for not preventing the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Director Tenet apparently took the White House endorsement to the bank. Last April, in an assertion that now seems laughable, he insisted to Capitol Hill 9/11 probers in that the Sept. attacks had nothing whatsoever to do with any intelligence lapses at the CIA.
No wonder New Republic was so hard on Gore!
If you ever get a chance to see the old movie "Wild In The Streets" you'll see some eerie similarities between the main character - Max Frost - and Bill Clinton. It's particularly chilling when this guy talks about ceasing national power by gathering up FBI files.
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