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=trueI'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/postsUnfortunately, 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.asptheir 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