This is a follow up to a story I posted last week about Woolsey testifying in a 9/11 lawsuit against saddam.
Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey: No Doubt Iraq Involved in 9/11
Iraq undoubtedly played a role in training the 9/11 hijackers to carry out attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, former CIA Director James Woolsey said last month, in comments that were largely ignored by the mainstream press.
"At [the Iraqi terrorist training camp] Salman Pak we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives," Woolsey told The New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg.
The exasperated ex-CIA chief complained: "I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, 'Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese'?"
Of course not, which makes the media's decision to ignore the Salman Pak story frighteningly irresponsible.
Woolsey's comments to The New Yorker preceded by just a few days his sworn testimony in a $1 trillion civil lawsuit brought by the families of the 9/11 victims against Iraq and Saudi Arabia, where he outlined the linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda in the worst attack on U.S. soil in American history.
"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge was involved here," he told a Manhattan courtroom in early March.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have also brought evidence that the Bush CIA, run by Clinton holdover George Tenet, has evidently deemed as unfit to share with the American people video footage of the Salman Pak training camp - complete with a Boeing 707 allegedly used by the Sept. 11 terrorists for practice.
In fact, the U.S. and British press was chock full of news about Saddam's Salman Pak hijacking school in the months after the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. But with the deluge of 9/11 news at the time, most of that information was lost in the shuffle.
Now, with the Bush administration poised to strike back at the 9/11 co-conspirators in Baghdad, the Salman Pak story is more important than ever. But suddenly reporters have decided that news of Saddam's 707 hijack school - including bombshell items like Woolsey's testimony in the 9/11 lawsuit - isn't particularly newsworthy.
In fact, with the exception of a couple of brief reports buried deep inside the New York Daily News, the case has been all but ignored in the U.S. press.
A report in the British press reveals, however, that lawyers for the claimants intend to draw direct links between Twin Towers kamikaze ringleader Mohamed Atta and Saddam's role in the 9/11 plot.
"Five key witnesses have provided chilling details outlining the way the Iraqi dictator provided training for the Al Qaeda terrorists whose murderous work left more than 3,000 people dead," reported London's Sunday Express on Feb. 2, after obtaining key documents in the case.
"The court documents reveal how Saddam provided the September 11 terrorists with a Boeing 707 so they could practise seizing control of the cockpit. Eyewitnesses will tell a district court ... how Iraqi citizens acted as jet crew and passengers so the terror gang could hone their hijacking skills."
"Mohamed Atta," the court documents reportedly contend, "briefed the Iraqis on his mission and received both financial and practical support from Saddam."
So why hasn't the Bush administration made the case for Saddam's Salman Pak connection to 9/11?
Some say it's the president's misplaced reliance on CIA Director George Tenet, who, unlike Woolsey, has declined to sound the alarm over reports of the hijack school. In fact, up until recently, Tenet had been publicly skeptical of any connection whatsoever between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
It was the CIA, for instance, that repeatedly tried to shoot down intelligence showing that Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague just months before the attacks - only to have Czech intelligence repeatedly counter that the meeting indeed took place.
According to New Republic magazine, CIA skepticism about Salman Pak has its roots in the agency's disdain for the Iraqi National Congress. The INC played a key role in spiriting a number of Salman Pak defectors out of Iraq ? people who later shared with the CIA and FBI the most compelling evidence to date that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The INC also played a critical role in facilitating the escape of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, the physicist who ran the Iraqi nuclear program before his 1994 defection to the West. Hamza is responsible for most of what the U.S. knows about Saddam's nuclear ambitions. In his book, "Saddam's Bombmaker," he describes his exasperation at the CIA, which also initially tried to brush him off.
So why doesn't Bush overrule his CIA chief and tell the world what he knows about Saddam's role in 9/11? According to Iraq expert Laurie Mylroie, who argues that Baghdad's role in the attacks goes back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Bush is unwilling to challenge his own intelligence bureaucracy.
Some of that reluctance might be explained by the Bush family's still-strong ties to the CIA. With Bush Sr. serving as CIA director in the 1970s, the president may feel he has a personal stake in protecting the Agency's reputation.
It certainly seemed that way in the days immediately following 9/11 - when critics were demanding to know how and why the agency had let America down. But instead of announcing any CIA shake-up, the president himself traveled to its headquarters in Langley, Va., to assure agency officials that there would be no recriminations.
No wonder Mr. Tenet can claim without fear of reprimand, as he did in congressional testimony in April 2002, that the 9/11 attacks represented no intelligence failure whatsoever on the part of the CIA.
Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey: No Doubt Iraq Involved in 9/11
Iraq undoubtedly played a role in training the 9/11 hijackers to carry out attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, former CIA Director James Woolsey said last month, in comments that were largely ignored by the mainstream press.
"At [the Iraqi terrorist training camp] Salman Pak we know there were Islamist terrorists training to hijack airplanes in groups of four or five with short knives," Woolsey told The New Yorker magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg.
The exasperated ex-CIA chief complained: "I mean, hello? If we had seen after December 7, 1941, a fake American battleship in a lake in northern Italy, and a group of Asian pilots training there, would we have said, 'Well, you can't prove that they were Japanese'?"
Of course not, which makes the media's decision to ignore the Salman Pak story frighteningly irresponsible.
Woolsey's comments to The New Yorker preceded by just a few days his sworn testimony in a $1 trillion civil lawsuit brought by the families of the 9/11 victims against Iraq and Saudi Arabia, where he outlined the linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda in the worst attack on U.S. soil in American history.
"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge was involved here," he told a Manhattan courtroom in early March.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have also brought evidence that the Bush CIA, run by Clinton holdover George Tenet, has evidently deemed as unfit to share with the American people video footage of the Salman Pak training camp - complete with a Boeing 707 allegedly used by the Sept. 11 terrorists for practice.
In fact, the U.S. and British press was chock full of news about Saddam's Salman Pak hijacking school in the months after the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. But with the deluge of 9/11 news at the time, most of that information was lost in the shuffle.
Now, with the Bush administration poised to strike back at the 9/11 co-conspirators in Baghdad, the Salman Pak story is more important than ever. But suddenly reporters have decided that news of Saddam's 707 hijack school - including bombshell items like Woolsey's testimony in the 9/11 lawsuit - isn't particularly newsworthy.
In fact, with the exception of a couple of brief reports buried deep inside the New York Daily News, the case has been all but ignored in the U.S. press.
A report in the British press reveals, however, that lawyers for the claimants intend to draw direct links between Twin Towers kamikaze ringleader Mohamed Atta and Saddam's role in the 9/11 plot.
"Five key witnesses have provided chilling details outlining the way the Iraqi dictator provided training for the Al Qaeda terrorists whose murderous work left more than 3,000 people dead," reported London's Sunday Express on Feb. 2, after obtaining key documents in the case.
"The court documents reveal how Saddam provided the September 11 terrorists with a Boeing 707 so they could practise seizing control of the cockpit. Eyewitnesses will tell a district court ... how Iraqi citizens acted as jet crew and passengers so the terror gang could hone their hijacking skills."
"Mohamed Atta," the court documents reportedly contend, "briefed the Iraqis on his mission and received both financial and practical support from Saddam."
So why hasn't the Bush administration made the case for Saddam's Salman Pak connection to 9/11?
Some say it's the president's misplaced reliance on CIA Director George Tenet, who, unlike Woolsey, has declined to sound the alarm over reports of the hijack school. In fact, up until recently, Tenet had been publicly skeptical of any connection whatsoever between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
It was the CIA, for instance, that repeatedly tried to shoot down intelligence showing that Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague just months before the attacks - only to have Czech intelligence repeatedly counter that the meeting indeed took place.
According to New Republic magazine, CIA skepticism about Salman Pak has its roots in the agency's disdain for the Iraqi National Congress. The INC played a key role in spiriting a number of Salman Pak defectors out of Iraq ? people who later shared with the CIA and FBI the most compelling evidence to date that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
The INC also played a critical role in facilitating the escape of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, the physicist who ran the Iraqi nuclear program before his 1994 defection to the West. Hamza is responsible for most of what the U.S. knows about Saddam's nuclear ambitions. In his book, "Saddam's Bombmaker," he describes his exasperation at the CIA, which also initially tried to brush him off.
So why doesn't Bush overrule his CIA chief and tell the world what he knows about Saddam's role in 9/11? According to Iraq expert Laurie Mylroie, who argues that Baghdad's role in the attacks goes back to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Bush is unwilling to challenge his own intelligence bureaucracy.
Some of that reluctance might be explained by the Bush family's still-strong ties to the CIA. With Bush Sr. serving as CIA director in the 1970s, the president may feel he has a personal stake in protecting the Agency's reputation.
It certainly seemed that way in the days immediately following 9/11 - when critics were demanding to know how and why the agency had let America down. But instead of announcing any CIA shake-up, the president himself traveled to its headquarters in Langley, Va., to assure agency officials that there would be no recriminations.
No wonder Mr. Tenet can claim without fear of reprimand, as he did in congressional testimony in April 2002, that the 9/11 attacks represented no intelligence failure whatsoever on the part of the CIA.
