Posted on 06/13/2006 9:01:55 AM PDT by GipperCT
In the wake of Abu Musab Zarqawi's death, mainstream media organs like the New York Times and Newsweek have run chronologies of the archterrorist's life that omit mention of his stay in Baghdad in 2002, while others, including the Associated Press, have attempted to discredit the Bush administration's claims that Zarqawi was a link between Iraq and al Qaeda. As Stephen Hayes shows in the Weekly Standard, the AP account is wrong. While the full extent of Zarqawi's connections with Baghdad are still a matter of debate, it is false to assert, as AP and others have done since Zarqawi's death, that talk about the connection is little more than "myth-making" on the part of the Bush administration.
(Excerpt) Read more at insider.washingtontimes.com ...
Ha, I know believe me but nothing wrong with throwing a good news source some additional customers....
bump for later...
I am trying to find any information that links Zarqawi as a active member of Salman Pak's terrorist training camp.
Yes, why is it that we never hear any more about Salmon Pak. /sigh
The White House made clear of its existance yet the drive by media ignored it.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect5.html
Former Iraqi military officers have described a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations.
Can't be true - Dan Rather sent me a memo denying it...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/550kmbzd.asp
"The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S.
intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."
bump
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