The Senate Intelligence Committee, reporting on the pre-invasion intelligence on Iraq, finds that the US intelligence community had no evidence whatsoever of terrorist training facilities or activities at Iraq’s Salman Pak military base. The report says, “Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qaeda training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qaeda operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations.” The report will note testimony from both CIA and DIA officials that found “no indications that training of al-Qaeda linked individuals took place there.” The DIA told the committee in June 2006 that it has “no credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak after 1991.” [Senate Intelligence Committee, 9/8/2006 
] The base was found to be just what the Iraqis said it was: a training camp for counterterrorism operations, focused on foiling terrorist hijackings of jetliners (see April 6, 2003).
September 8-10, 2006: Bipartisan Senate Report Confirms Atta Meeting in Prague Never Took Place
A bipartisan Senate report concludes that “Post-war findings… confirm that no such meeting ever occurred” between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague. It notes that “Post-war debriefings of [the alleged Iraqi agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani,] indicate that he had never seen or heard of Atta until after September 11, 2001, when Atta’s face appeared on the news.” [US Senate and Intelligence Committee, 9/8/2006 ] But two days later Vice President Cheney is asked if the meeting ever took place and he still maintains that it could have (see September 10, 2006).
September 10, 2006: Cheney Still Asserts Al-Qaeda-Hussein Connection and Refuses to Deny Atta-Iraqi Agent Meeting Took Place
Vice President Cheney appears on Meet the Press two days after a bipartisan Senate report asserts that there was no link of any sort between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda before 9/11, except for one meeting held in 1995. Cheney claims he has not read the report yet, but he says, “whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.… [Militant leader Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, poisons facility, ran by Ansar al-Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaeda.… [The Iraqi government] was a state sponsor of terror. [Saddam Hussein] had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.” [Meet the Press, 9/10/2006] In fact, the Senate report determined that although al-Zarqawi was in Baghdad, the Iraqi government tried hard to find him and catch him, and that Ansar al-Islam was in a part of Iraq outside the control of the Iraq government and the government was actively opposed to them as well. The report claims there was no meeting between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001. [US Senate and Intelligence Committee, 9/8/2006 ] But regarding that meeting, Cheney still does not deny it took place, even though it has been widely discredited. “We don’t know. I mean, we’ve never been able to, to, to link it, and the FBI and CIA have worked it aggressively. I would say, at this point, nobody has been able to confirm…” [Meet the Press, 9/10/2006] Earlier in the year, Cheney had conceded that the meeting “has been pretty well knocked down now at this stage, that that meeting ever took place” (see March 29, 2006).
September 10, 2006: Dutch Public Television Documentary Says Demolition of WTC 7 Is Proof of Government Conspiracy
A leading current affairs program on Dutch television says that 9/11 was a governmental conspiracy. The program is entitled “Zembla: Het complot van 11 september.” Zembla is a weekly investigative report shown on the public broadcasting network VARA. (A version of the program with English subtitles is available on Zembla’s website.) The program’s highlight is an interview with Danny Jowenko, a Dutch expert and industry professional in demolition. When shown a video of the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center, he concludes that it is undoubtedly the work of a professional demolition team. [Vara, 9/10/2006]
September 10, 2006: Bin Laden Trail Said to Have Gone Cold
The Washington Post reports in a front page story, “The clandestine US commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years. Nothing from the vast US intelligence world—no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image—has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, according to US and Pakistani officials.” It is widely believed by US intelligence that bin Laden is hiding in tribal areas of Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. Since May 2005, al-Qaeda has killed at least 23 tribal leaders in the region who are opposed to them, making intelligence collection increasingly difficult. There is no single person in charge of the US search for bin Laden with authority to direct covert operations. One counterterrorism official complains, “There’s nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden! Nobody!” However, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has become the de facto leader of the search. In recent months, President Bush has requested that the CIA “flood the zone” to gain better intelligence and efforts have stepped up. But at the same time, “Pakistan has grown increasingly reluctant to help the US search.… Pakistani and US counterterrorism and military officials admit that Pakistan has now all but stopped looking for bin Laden. ‘The dirty little secret is, [the US has] nothing, no operations, without the Paks,’ one former counterterrorism officer said.” [Washington Post, 9/10/2006]
September 11, 2006: 9/11 Family Members Ask for a New Investigation
9/11 victims’ family members Donna Marsh O’Connor, Christina Kminek, and Michelle Little hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to call for a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, they want to promote an independently-produced documentary that questions gaps in the official investigations of 9/11. The documentary is 9/11: Press For Truth, which focuses on the families that fought for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. “We are not crazy. We have questions,” says O’Connor. Asked: “Why had the US military defenses failed to stop any of the four hijacked planes [on 9/11]?” former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, who helped lead the 9/11 Commission, says the Commission looked into the issue and got conflicting answers. He says: “Were we lied to? I don’t know that answer. We certainly were given bad information.” [WTHR, 9/11/2006]
September 11, 2006: Al-Zawahiri Allegedly Releases 9/11 Anniversary Message
A video lasting one hour and 16 minutes is released by a man thought to be al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11. He calls on Muslims to resist the US, threatens “new events,” and says, “Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster.” He also calls for the release of the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, and says attacks on Westeners and Jews are considered fair, as “the reality of international politics is the humiliation and repression of the Muslim at the hands of the idol-kings who dominate this world.” In addition, he comments that the war in Afghanistan “is very good” for the Taliban, and that allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are “doomed.” The video, which was made available by being posted on the Internet, references recent events such as a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. According to CNN, the video is “more technically sophisticated” than previous al-Qaeda videos, as it has subtitles, a highlights section at the beginning, and an interviewer who asks the man thought to be al-Zawahiri questions. [CNN, 9/11/2006]
September 12, 2006: US Still Has No National Intelligence Estimate on Al-Qaeda
It is reported that the US has not conducted a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups since 9/11. An NIE is a formal, top-secret analysis about a particular threat combining intelligence from all relevant government agencies. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, says, “When I left the CIA in November 2004, they had not done an NIE on al-Qaeda. In fact, there has never been an NIE on the subject since the 1990s.” The last NIE on the subject in fact was released in 1997 (see 1997 and Late 2000-September 10, 2001). Rolling Stone magazine concludes, “Today, the [NIE] process remains bogged down in interagency disputes—largely because of resistance by the Pentagon to any conclusions that would weaken its primary role in counterterrorism. As a result, the Bush administration remains uncertain about the true nature of the terrorist foes that America faces—and unable to devise an effective strategy to combat those foes.” [Rolling Stone, 9/12/2006]
September 12, 2006: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez Casts Doubts on Official 9/11 Story
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suggests that the World Trade Center could have been brought down on 9/11 with explosives. “The hypothesis is not absurd… that those towers could have been dynamited. A building never collapses like that, unless it’s with an implosion. The hypothesis that is gaining strength… is that it was the same US imperial power that planned and carried out this terrible terrorist attack or act against its own people and against citizens of all over the world. Why? To justify the aggressions that immediately were unleashed on Afghanistan, on Iraq. A plane supposedly crashed into the Pentagon, but no one ever found a single remnant of that plane.” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro raises the same theories in a speech and calls for an independent investigation. He says: “It’s really worrisome to think that all of that could have been a great conspiracy against humanity. An independent international investigation must be carried out one day to discover the truth about the events of Sept. 11.” [Associated Press, 9/12/2006]
September 12, 2006: President Bush Says Getting Bin Laden Is Low Priority Compared to Getting Intel to Stop New Attacks
President Bush tells a journalist that getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to getting intelligence to stop new attacks. Fred Barnes, executive director of the Weekly Standard, and some other journalists met with Bush on September 12, 2006. Asked the next day on Fox News if Bush thinks catching bin Laden is “priority number one,” Barnes replies, “Well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of American resources. His vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill Americans before they occur. That’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from England, and that’s the top priority. He says, you know, getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to that.” [Fox News, 9/13/2006]
