Salman Pak Facility - Credibility of Defectors

Credibility of Defectors

Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led some U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior U.S. official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak. The credibility of the defectors has been questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for an invasion of Iraq. "The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war", said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News.

The DIA told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2006 that after Operation Desert Storm, "fabricators and unestablished sources who reported hearsay or thirdhand information created a large volume of human intelligence reporting. This type of reporting surged after September 2001 and continued well after the capture of Salman Pak." Yet the DIA's postwar exploitation of the facility found "no information from Salman Pak that links al-Qa'ida with the former regime." (p. 84)