The training area in which the Trident rests in dilapidated condition:
Scott Ritter standing near the jet
According to r93tb, "Time magazine calls this part of an 'antiterrorist training camp in Iraq.'"
British Trident:
Posted on 06/20/2004 10:21:42 AM PDT by kattracks
State Department and CIA officials have quietly told reporters they accept Saddam Hussein's explanation that radical Islamists who trained in Iraq before 9/11 to hijack airplanes using small knives were engaged in counter-terrorism training.Speaking on condition of anonymity to the Knight Ridder news service, the officials challenged the credibility of two White House reports issued last year, which had raised questions about whether activities at the notorious terrorist training camp Salman Pak were linked to the 9/11 attacks. One unnamed U.S. official cited a CIA assessment first supplied to the White House in January 2003 in response to the reports, more than a year after two Iraqi defectors told the FBI that they trained radical Muslims at Salman Pak in hijacking techniques never used before the 9/11 attacks.
"The probability that the training provided at such centers, e.g. Salman Pak, was similar to that al Qaida could offer at its own camps in Afghanistan, combined with the sourcing difficulties, leads us to conclude that we need additional corroboration before we can validate that this low level basic terrorist training for al Qaida occurred in Iraq," the CIA concluded.
Said Knight Ridder: "U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that the base was most probably used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking tactics."
The conclusion that training at Salman Pak was innocuous is not shared by Charles Duelfer, who replaced David Kay as head of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group earlier this year.
In Nov. 2001, Duelfer - then an UNSCOM weapons inspector - said the Iraqi government made the same claim to him - that hijacking drills at Salman Pak were actually counter-terrorism exercises.
"Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer said, dismissing the alibi as an obvious fraud.
"I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. "I mean, what, actually, do you expect?" he added.
But Duelfer's corroboration - along with satellite photos confirming the defectors' contention that the drills took place aboard an actual Boeing 707 fuselage parked nowhere near an airstrip - failed to persuade the CIA and the State Department, which continued to question their credibility.
The State Department, in particular, worked strenuously to block publication of the two White House reports, describing the Salman Pak hijack drills, Knight Ridder said.
One of those reports, dubbed "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" was released as a background paper in conjunction with Bush's Sept. 12, 2002, U.N. address, but was ignored by the press.
The second publication, "Iraq: From Fear to Freedom," was distributed abroad. It cited claims by Iraqi defector Sabah Khodada, who said he trained radical Islamists at Salman Pak to hijack U.S. airliners.
Earlier Khodada had told the London Observer that he believed the 9/11 attacks were carried out "by graduates of Salman Pak."
The Bush administration booklet reported:
"Khodada ... confirmed numerous press reports that Salman Pak had an entire Boeing 707 jetliner that was used for training in hijacking techniques - from smuggling weapons on board to methods for overpowering the crew and terrorizing passengers into cowed submission."
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Knight Ridder that the White House ordered the State Department to publish the two reports over the objections of some State Department officials.
Did Iraq even own any 707s?
Puzzling. Why would Iraq require radical Islamists to protect their passenger aircraft?
Who are these people? Are they suggesting that Ansar al-Islam is a counter-terrorism organization?
This doesn't make a lick of sense. With all due respect to Newsmax, unsourced stories this confusing are almost less than useless.
The training area in which the Trident rests in dilapidated condition:
Scott Ritter standing near the jet
According to r93tb, "Time magazine calls this part of an 'antiterrorist training camp in Iraq.'"
British Trident:
True, and it goes back even further than that. The State Dept. used to be the KGB's American Office and you could probably still swing a dead cat at the department today and hit quite a few of the Old Guard.
Remember, too, that this is the department that "lost" sensitive laptops at least once a week during the Clinton admin.
Letting Rummy clean the department out would be an act of compassion, IMO.
Yeah, and Bill Clinton was teaching Juanita Broaddrick self-defense techniques to fend off rapists.
Only that fusilage of one they were using for practice.
The State Dept and CIA believes this nonsense?
How stupid do they think we are?????!?
Just like that ... the links were cut to the satellite photo(s) and the photo of the Trident.
And First Aid. Remember his prescription" "Better put some ice on that."
More undermining from clinton holdovers in the state department.
Quoting, and trusting, Sadaam over Bush????
Insanity.
My thoughts exactly, Kat! The 'duh' factor in this article is overwhelming. I have no doubt though that I will hear this idiotic mantra from liberal relatives when I raise the issue of Salman Pak. ... Unless of course, a few of the names of highjackers of 9/11 show up on Salman Pak roles now being translated. THEN let the liberal pukes of America try to defend this idiotic denial of Saddam's training for highjackers! Is it rational to believe Saddam would train Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian terrorists to take over planes, yet he didn't train al Qaeda operatives for whom Osma expressly asked to have training while Osama was in Sudan and early on in Afghanistan? Defies adult rationality what liberals want to believe in order to support their irrational hatred for the Bush administration.!
"The probability that the training provided at such centers, e.g. Salman Pak, was similar to that al Qaida could offer at its own camps in Afghanistan ... What nonsense! Saddam had a Boeing jet fuselage parked at Salman Pak, there was no such 'set' in Afghanistan.
While I share your concerns about the State Dept. In this case the article states that the State Dept says this was a terror training facility and the CIA is discounting that.
Did anyone else hear/see the exchange with Mansour Ijaz on Fox News? His name is being mentioned for CIA Chief? Is this possible?
The same with State & the CIA on the mobile bio labs....we're told they were hydrogen producing labs...BUT, they are very quiet that they indeed were bio labs, and that they were used to grow bacteria that produced hydrogen.
It is obviously a "dual-use technology" that's designed to provide an alibi when discovered.
They CAN BE used to produce anthrax.
But you'll never get the media to admit that. And the CIA backed them up.
The CIA is full of liberals.
There, that's better...
PBS Frontline - Gunning for Saddam
Sabah Khodada was a captain in the Iraqi army from 1982 to 1992. He worked at what he describes as a highly secret terrorist training camp at Salman Pak (see Khodada's hand-drawn map of the camp), an area south of Baghdad. In this translated interview, conducted in association with The New York Times on Oct. 14, 2001, Khodada describes what went on at Salman Pak, including details on training hijackers. He emigrated to the U.S. in May 2001.[Editors Note, June 2004: A year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada's account of the activities at Salman Pak. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein.]
After your service in the army, you worked for a secret part of the Iraqi government?
Some of it is not very secretive. But there's another part, which has a lot to do with international terrorism and this kind of operation -- this is very secretive.
Maybe you could tell me what this section is called, and who runs it. And what did it do?
It's called the Division of Special Operations. ... This whole camp where their training is run by the Iraqi [security service]... The government organization [that] basically possesses or have control of the camp is the Iraqi intelligence. But different training people who come, they are headed or sent by different people in the Iraqi government.
You say that this is a secret camp. But what was it like? Was it something you drove by and could see on the highway? Did you need special clearance to go there? How would you describe this place, this location?
If you're driving on those farm roads, you could probably see the edges of the camp, but you wouldn't realize this is a special camp. The camp is huge. And the locations for the training are far from anybody can see them from the outside. But even when we have visitors, even at the level of a minister, or even higher than a minister in the Iraqi government, they will have to drive around the camp or be driven in the camp inside very specific type of a vehicle. They will sit on the back seat, for example, of this vehicle and they would have ... in addition to the shaded windows, they will have to pull down curtains and they snap those curtains on the bottom, to make sure nobody can see anything outside this vehicle while they're driven around.
This is even government officials [who] are not allowed to see this kind of training?
Yes. At the very highest level, they cannot see this training.
What kind of training went on, and who was being trained?
Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism.
The people being trained were Iraqis in one group, and non-Iraqis, or foreign nationals, in another?
Non-Iraqis were trained separately from us. There were strict orders not to meet with them and not to talk to them. And even when they conduct their training, their training has to occur at times different from the times when we conduct the Iraqis our own training.
The map:
When Saddam invaded Kuwait, he hauled back several commercial jets from Kuwait to Iraq.
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