Salmon pak

[greenman3610]

I was listening to O Reilly today to hear the reaction, and
he brought up 2 arguments to bolster the 911 connection.
1) the terrorist camps at Ansar al Islam. I was surprised at this,
because I thought someone like him should know that was in the
no fly zone, out of Saddam's control, and no ricin, the toxin
they were supposedly manufacturing was found there...

2) the supposed terrorist training camp at Salmon Pak, where it
was said that terrorists trained on a model airplane.
Now it seems I've heard this debunked, but I can't for he life
of me remember what the deal was.
anyone that can help out?

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

1. Lol! Was this one of "Curveballs" wonderful piece of Intelligence?

They supposedly found abandoned airplanes there that they claimed were being used for hijacking training. The planes were I believe gutted out oldies.

BTW... Curveball was a cousin of Allawi......

[Tempest]

2. According to Seymour Hersh...

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.

---------------

This is from a New Yorker article I had documented, but the link no longer works.

Alternative link:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0512selective.htm

[Tempest]

3. Another cite

According to the report: "two former Iraqi intelligence officers" brought to the CIA by the Iraqi opposition group the Iraqi National Congress (INC) had provided classified testimony claiming "that Saddam was using a base south of Baghdad, in an agricultural community called Salman Pak, to train non-Iraqi Arabs in hijacking and other black arts of terrorism". According to the publication, the CIA remained unconvinced, even at this point. The CIA had for some time dismissed intelligence coming from INC sources, going "back to Clinton-era efforts to topple Saddam", the magazine said, when agency officials began to suspect that an INC leader had undermined a planned coup against Saddam because it was spearheaded by a rival dissident group. Still, despite the CIA's refusal to accept the intelligence reporting on Salman Pak, key Bush Administration policymakers, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were reported to be taking the defectors' accounts seriously. Some significant Bush Administration advisors, such as Defense Policy advisor Richard Perle, have long built up trusting relations with INC leaders.

Reports that the CIA refuses to take the Salman Pak story seriously are not new. Six weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Newsweek magazine noted: "When anti-Saddam Iraqis told US officials as recently as two weeks ago of a defector with information about 'terrorist training' operations at Salman Pak, the CIA officer on the case was openly dismissive."

http://www.strategicstudies.org/crisis/Iraq.htm

(Link no longer works, but you might be able to find an alternative cite)

[Emit]

4. I had to do this the other day with a rightwing nut case

on another board. Here's the best article I found:

Posted on Mon, Mar. 15, 2004
Iraqi exile group fed false information to news media
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/8194211.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp


By Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.

A June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress to the Senate Appropriations Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program, a U.S.-funded effort to collect intelligence in Iraq.

The assertions in the articles reinforced President Bush's claims that Saddam Hussein should be ousted because he was in league with Osama bin Laden, was developing nuclear weapons and was hiding biological and chemical weapons.

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.
<<snip>>

A list of the 108 articles that the Iraqi National Congress says were based on information it supplied to news media is available on the web at www.krwashington.com.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/8194211.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp