Remember Those Terrorist Training Camp Videos From 2002?

The ones that made a splashy debut on Sixty Minutes II, and then were shown in perpetuity on every TV news show? Looks like they may have been faked.

The source of the tapes, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema—known familiarly as Keith—was more than a little dubious. Idema claimed to be working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance, but he was also an ex-con who had served three years in federal prison for wire fraud and had a criminal record in three states. He was, in addition, a serial litigator who had once sued CBS. […]

Special Forces soldiers, other journalists, and Army Intelligence immediately questioned the tapes' authenticity. Tracy-Paul Warrington, formerly a chief warrant officer with U.S. Special Forces who now advises American police forces on counterterrorism, says the tapes are not an intimate look at anything—except clumsy military playacting. "Eighty-five percent of terrorists' attacks in the last decade have been bombings," Warrington says. "In this film we see raids. This was a method that went out in the seventies, when Idema was in the Army. I was looking at seven hours of tape of something that Al Qaeda doesn't do." Another retired Special Forces soldier, and a longtime acquaintance of Keith Idema's, contacted CIA sources and learned the agency had similar concerns about the tapes' authenticity. "The CIA ran voice analysis on the tapes and concluded they were staged," he says, adding that the agency didn't publicize its findings because it "didn't want to waste its time on someone it considered harmless." Contacted about this claim, CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said the network "showed the tape to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda, and to a top U.S. military official in Aghanistan, who told us that, in his opinion, the video was authentic." In the terror-charged atmosphere of early 2002, in any event, there was no public outcry over the piece's authenticity.

Whole fascinating story here.