an Iraq lie that fell off radar: Saddam using airliner fuselage to train hijackers

[yurbud]

I remember seeing this on 60 Minutes in a segment with Leslie Stahl. She didn't have photos, just interviews of Iraqi denials. Right after 9/11 when everybody was still shell-shocked, this lie made a deep impact and probably contributed to that 70% who at one time believed Saddam had something to do with 9/11.

Sy Hersh of the New Yorker's summary of the lie:

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.


http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?printable=true

I've googled this a couple of times, and our friends at Freerepublic helpfully posted links to a couple of other sources of this story.

One was Rush Limbaugh:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/866766/posts

Unfortunately, you can't get to his page on the story because it's only for paid subscribers (and I aint making a donation). Someone did get a good link on this pic:



Another freeper article:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/733893/posts

National Review coverage of the story:
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040303.asp
their coverage of NY Times saying story is BS:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/carson200406020845.asp


Hersh had the best summary of the real story in an article in the New Yorker:

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.”

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact?printable=true

Wikipedia's excellent coverage of the devolution of a lie:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Pak_facility

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

1. This was one of the lies that came from Curveball. This lie was resurrected on Coast to Coast AM

this past Saturday night by Art Bell's guest, Michael Shrimpton. Coast to Coast AM has the largest overnight radio audience in the country. I think this man is a paid disinformation agent. This is what we are up against when trying to continually get the truth out there. BTW.. I wrote Art Bell about this.

Here is his bio

Bio
Michael Shrimpton is a specialist in national security and is a strategic intelligence and counter-terrorism consultant. He has represented US and Israeli intelligence officers, briefed staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Joint Congressional inquiry into 9-11. Michael came within 50 yards of operational Hezbollah terrorists in June 2003 on the Israel/Lebanon frontier and addressed panels on terrorism in Washington DC and Los Angeles following 9-11. He also actively assisted intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the Global War on Terror, and was instrumental in exposing the notorious 'hood' Abu Ghraib photograph as a fake. In addition, Michael is represented by two bureaus, the American Program Bureau and the Washington Speakers Bureau.

[yurbud]

2. the guy who was in the hood photo gave interviews!

I'm surprised Shrimpton didn't change it from Iraq to Iran.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

3. lol! He might have made up other lies concerning Iran. After he perpetuated the lie

about Salman Park, I shut the show off.


BTW.... before the war, I knew Salman Park was a bunch of BS, and had endless debates with freepers on an AOL message board about that and other lies that were drum beating us to war.

[yurbud]

4. the fact that Saddam was secular and al Qaeda was religious seemed to have no meaning to them

on the right, they figure they's all A-rabs so we might as well kill 'em.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

5. America had been kept in the dark about that. MSM was too busy beating the war drums.

Last night on Real Time, Bill Bradley was trying to bring reason to the Iraq debate by discussing the history of the country now called Iraq. On the surface, most people here have no idea of the history in the region. But they do, if only they put Lawrence of Arabia on tv during prime time. I'm sure millions have seen it, loved it, but forgot the larger "picture" of the film.

I think it's about time they received a refresher course to understand that there is no way to "win" this fiasco and that we have to save our military and treasury, and start withdrawal immediately.

[yurbud]

6. oddly, most miss the lesson of Lawrence: promise freedom, then give them a new screwing

Lawrence peeled the Arabs off the Ottoman Empire to make it easier to knock down and control those smaller pieces.

That's exactly what we are doing now, only not subtly enough to actually fool the natives.

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.