Have we found the Salmon Pak terrorist training center in Iraq yet?

[underpants]

Or is this place like Neverneverland?

As I understand the US has unrestricted access in Iraq now. Maybe this was moved to Syria too. :eyes:

Despite the lack of coverage or footage of one of the pre-war ghost stories and those stories that flared up and went away (the Iraqi ghost fleet/Brit uniforms stolen) they still haven't given up in this one. To be fair I might have missed the telling Fox News doumentary showing the camp and explaining how all the reports were justified.

Newsmax article from Sunday Jan. 9th 2005(see freeper discussion of it that follows)

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/1/9/123237.shtml

Starting in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein forged alliances with Muslim radicals from Saudi Arabia who practiced the same brand of militant Islam as Osama bin Laden, Saudi dissidents in London revealed last week.

In Oct. 2001, two Iraqi defectors told U.S. intelligence that they taught radical Islamists at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak to hijack U.S. aircraft in groups of four and five using small knives.

oh yeah then there is this part of the article

U.S. intelligence agencies eventually rejected the notion of a link between Salman Pak and the 9/11 attacks, based in part on the presumption that secularist Saddam would have never conspired with religious fundamentalists.

Officials at the CIA and State Department concluded that while hijack training did take place at Salman Pak, it was actually to instruct Iraqi counterterrorism units in anti-hijacking tactics.

The Freepers short thread (note especially the PARTS of the 9/11 Commission report posted)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1317252/posts

[livinginphotographs]

1. :crickets chirping:

I find it hard to believe Saddam would've allowed religious fundamentalists to run loose in his country. They were a threat to him as much as they are a threat to us.

Those same religious fundamentalists would probably want to try some sort of uprising against him, so this is just more bullshit propaganda.

Freepers never fail to amaze me with their critical thinking skills, though. Everytime I say, "9-11 had nothing to do with Iraq," they always spout off the tripe about Salman Pak.

[underpants]

2. One remembers seeing a shot of a plane in the desert

I remember that too but I realized that that doesn't mean anything, at least to me it didn't. Just because the voice over is talking about this mystical camp AND the images is of an airplane in *a* desert that doesn't mean that either has to do with the other OR that that is what the reporter is stating.

[jayfish]

3. Here You Go.

"SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE"

<SNIP>
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 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.”

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.
</SNIP>

A couple of side notes:

1. It has become more difficult, over time, to find this info when people ask about it
2. I can't believe all of the people who STILL cite Salman Pak when they try to make the Saddam/ bin Laden connection.

[underpants]

4. Hmmmmm Iraqi defectors not telling the truth

I'm sure the powers that be are aware of this and will make sure they don't fall for that again.

SEYMOUR M. HERSH huh? Thanks I wasn't sure if the Salman Pak thing really ever existed but apparently it did. Selective Intelligence indeed.