Iraqi Officers: Al Qaida Operatives Were Trained Near Baghdad (911 Training/Rehearsals)

Iraqi Officers: Al Qaida Operatives Were Trained For War Near Baghdad (Trained For 911 By Iraq - Take That Rats!!)

Saudi nationals helped Saddam Hussein recruit and finance Al Qaida insurgents as part of preparations to confront U.S. troops in Iraq.

Iraqi officers who have been interrogated by the United States and coalition officials reported the Saudi role in recruiting and training of Al Qaida units in Iraq. The officers said Saddam, through Saudi contacts, had invited Al Qaida insurgents to form suicide and other units to stop the U.S. military in March.

Saddam's contacts with Al Qaida, the officers told interrogators, preceded the group's Sept. 11, 2001 strikes on New York and Washington. They said Saudi envoys arranged for Al Qaida insurgents to enter Iraq and begin training in camps around Baghdad.

The Al Qaida insurgents were trained at two camps — Nahrawan and Salman Pak — under the supervision of the Fedayeen Saddam.

One officer who completed his interrogation was allowed to reveal details of the Saudi role in Al Qaida's operations in Iraq. The officer, identified as "L," told the independent Iraqi weekly Al Yawm Al Aakher that he saw Al Qaida members arrive in Iraq as early as July 2001 for what he described as a secret mission.

"L" said 100 trainees arrived, many of them from Saudi Arabia, led by a cleric named Mohammed. The officer said the Saudi cleric, himself a skilled fighter, remained in Iraq for the war against the United States.

Officers said the Salman Pak training included ways to hijack airplanes. Training was conducted under the supervision of an unidentified Iraqi general who is currently a police commander. They said many of the Al Qaida insurgents left Iraq after their training stint.

Most of the Al Qaida insurgents, however, returned on the eve of the war to fight the United States. The officers said the Al Qaida members volunteered and fought in the battle for Baghdad.

The officers' testimony disputed assertions by Western intelligence agencies that the United States failed to establish a link between Al Qaida and Iraq before Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA was said to have disputed a Czech intelligence report of a meeting between Mohammed Atta, who led the suicide hijackers, and a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

Former Iraqi military officers have described a highly secret terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations.

Salman Pak, located 30-40 km SE of Baghdad, engaged in laboratory scale research on Anthrax, Botulinum toxin, Clostridium, perfringens (gas gangrene), mycotoxins, aflatoxins, and Ricin. Researchers at this site carried out toxicity evaluations of these agents and examined their growth characteristics and survivability.

Iraq told UN inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces. However, two defectors from Iraqi intelligence stated that they had worked for several years at the secret Iraqi government camp, which had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995. Training activities including simulated hijackings carried out in an airplane fuselage [said to be a Boeing 707] at the camp. The camp is divided into distinct sections. On one side of the camp young, Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam are trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage. The Islamic militants trained on the other side of the camp, in an area separated by a small lake, trees and barbed wire. The militants reportedly spent time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the airplane. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iraq/salman_pak.htm

April 3, 2003, 2:40 p.m.

The 9/11 Connection
What Salman Pak could reveal.

Not far from Baghdad, Coalition forces may uncover evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime with airline hijackings in general and the September 11 attacks in particular.

Salman Pak, a training camp on the Tigris River some 15 miles southeast of Iraq's capital, could clarify this question. According to Iraqi defectors and U.S. intelligence analysts, this is where Hussein's agents polished the air-piracy skills of foreign Islamist terrorists.

Details on this facility and its al Qaeda ties recently emerged in a Manhattan federal courtroom. Former CIA Director James Woolsey and Iraq scholar Laurie Mylroie offered sworn expert testimony in a largely overlooked lawsuit filed by the families of two people killed on 9/11. They are suing Iraq's government, among other rogue entities and individuals, for allegedly helping to murder their loved ones.

"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common effort in the sense of aiding or abetting or conspiracy was involved here between Iraq and the al Qaeda," Woolsey said on March 3. President Clinton's CIA chief from 1993 to 1995 added: "Even if one cannot show that...any of the individual 19 hijackers were trained at Salman Pak, the nature of the training and the circumstances suggest, to my mind, at least, some kind of common aiding, abetting, assistance, cooperation — whatever word you might want to take."

Mylroie, a Pentagon terrorism consultant and Iraq-policy adviser to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign (and author of The War Against America), also testified March 3. She believes "It took a state like Iraq to carry out an attack as really sophisticated, massive and deadly as what happened on September 11."

Top Iraqi defectors amplify these American suspicions.

"There have been several confirmed sightings of Islamic fundamentalists from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Gulf states being trained in terror tactics at the Iraqi intelligence camp at Salman Pak," Khidir Hamza, Iraq's former nuclear-weapons chief, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee last July 31. "The training involved assassination, explosions and hijacking."

"This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world," former Iraqi army captain Sabah Khodada told PBS's Frontline in an October 14, 2001 interview. Khodada worked at Salman Pak. He said that instruction there was "all for the general concept of hitting and attacking American targets and American interests." He added: "We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes...They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane...They are trained how to plant horror within the passengers by doing such actions." A map of the camp Khodada drew for Frontline closely matches satellite photos of the base, thus bolstering his story.

"I was the security officer in charge of the unit," at Salman Pak, an ex-Iraqi lieutenant general told Frontline anonymously in a November 6, 2001 interview. "This unit was under the direct supervision and control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service," he added. "And the fact that the training was concentrated on a plane made it even stranger as far as I was concerned."

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:Kc1Ci-FCgbAJ:www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040303.asp+Salman+Pak&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Salman Pak - Iraq‘s own terrorist training camp

Two Iraqi Military defectors, an unnamed former Lt. General and a Captain Sabah Khodada recently gave details of an Iraqi school at Salman Pak which includes training for the hijacking of passenger airliners and other modes of transportation. The former Iraqi General said that there was a old Boeing 707 resting next to rail tracks on edge of Salman Pak being used in terrorist training, the existence of this aircraft has been confirmed by UN. Inspectors.

The General, who had been the Security Officer in charge of the camp also reported that there were mixed nationality units including Saudi‘s, Egyptians and Chechens at Salman Pak. Usually about 40 strong, these terrorist units received upto five months of intensive training. However the terrorist units were actually under the control of Iraq‘s Al- Mukhabarat Intelligence Service and in particular a section called the Division of Special Operations. Much of this was also confirmed by Captain Khodada.

The foreign fighters were segregated from Iraqi military personnel and Saddam Husseins own Fedayeen, except during certain specific training sessions. The overall training program included assassination, kidnapping, sabotage or hijacking of aircraft, buses, trains, sabotage of public utilities and most importantly of all, in the use of Chemical, Biological and possibly crude nuclear devices.

However, the training also included how to prepare and carry out suicide attacks and involved how to get access to the flight cabin, getting weapons on board, security weakness, terrorizing the passengers and crew. Captain Khodada stated " Those ‘Arabs‘ are real volunteers. They come in small numbers, and they come with the intention to do some real suicidal operations. "

" It has been said openly in the (Iraqi)media and even to us, from the highest command, that the purpose of establishing of establishing Saddam’s Fedayeen Fighters is to attack American targets and American interests. This is known. There is no doubt about it. All this training is directed towards attacking American targets, and American interests."

Khodada added "The training does not only include hijacking of planes and sabotage, some of the people were trained to do parachuting. Some other areas were training on how to penetrate enemy lines and get information from behind enemy lines. But its all for the general concept of hitting and attacking American targets and American interests. "

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:RRQAJkbBLJUJ:www.intelmessages.org/Messages/National_Security/wwwboard/messages/826.html+Salman+Pak&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Here is what I have found, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times seems to be a main player, they are a subsidiary of WorldTribune.com:

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http://www.geostrategy-direct.com/geostrategy-direct/cuttingedge.html

More Information:

Geostrategy-Direct grows out of the work of those frontline soldiers in the silent intelligence wars that have been waged through the decades of the Soviet threat and continue in the new millennium. The intelligence foot soldiers toil unnoticed and underappreciated. Not all are heroic but neither are they as cynical and jaded as their fictional counterparts in spy novels and movies.

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For all these reasons, the editors of World Tribune.com are proud to offer Geostrategy-Direct for your consideration. Geostrategy-Direct will not waste your time with 'thumbsucker' analyses or recycled reports. We will not flood you with esoteric information but deliver only those exclusive reports our editors consider most vital to provide you and other busy and productive readers the competitive edge these times require for success.

http://www.geostrategy-direct.com/geostrategy-direct/subinfo.html

Geostrategy-Direct Backgrounder page
http://www.middleeast.org/usg.htm

Here are a few links to World Tribune:

Their Main Page:
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/

About them:
http://www.worldtribune.com/WorldTribune/purp.html

Hope this provides some of what you were looking for.

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