Are these the same Iraqi defectors who were shown to be hopelessly unreliable? One 45 minute claim in particular springs to mind.
by Seymour Hersh in the 12 May 2003 New Yorker goes into greater detail about Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami incident - it appears that what he had to say was completely fabricated (line breaks added by me, to make it readable):
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 airplanewhich appeared to be used for counter-terrorism trainingwhen 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. A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi’s group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the D.I.A. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi’s people. Last summer, the D.I.A. report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with Al Qaeda terrorists in the late nineteen-nineties at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of C.I.A. agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. He says, ‘No, that’s not what I said,’ the former intelligence official told me. He said, ‘I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn’t Al Qaeda.’ He never saw any chemical or biological training. Afterward, the former official said, the C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.
But the C.I.A. rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn’t. The former intelligence official went on, One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason withto the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God. He added, If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.