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The Salman Pak (al-Salman) '''facility''' was an Iraqi military facility located approximately 15 miles south of Baghdad on a peninsula formed by a broad eastward bend of the Tigris River , near the town of Salman Pak . LAYOUT AND LOCATION The facility grounds comprised approximately 20 square kilometres. According to the Federation Of American Scientists , the facility was used by the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence) to train Iraqi militia groups such as the Fedayeen in use of military small arms, RPG's, assassination, espionage, and counter insurgency techniques. The facility had also been a key center of Iraq’s biological chemical weapon program. In 1989 and 1990, the laboratories in the complex researched Anthrax , Botulinum , Clostridium , Perfringens , Mycotoxins , Aflatoxins , and Ricin . {Link without Title} {Link without Title} ALLEGED CONNECTIONS TO TERRORISM The facility was discussed in the leadup to the 2003 Invasion Of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress to assert that the facility was a terrorist training camp. The Senate Select Committee On Intelligence has since established that both the CIA and the DIA concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. A DIA analyst told the Committee, "The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel noted in November 2005 that "After the war, U.S. officials determined that a facility in Salman Pak was used to train Iraqi anti-terrorist commandos." Times, 1 November 2005, p. A5 . Iraqi defectors associated with the INC asserted that the facility was used by the notes that "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 the camp was used for terrorist training ."[http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact] September 11th Shortly after the September 11 Attacks , members of Ahmed Chalabi 's Iraqi National Congress promoted claims that the facility was used to train the hijackers. Sabah Khodada , a former captain in the Iraqi Army, claimed that the attacks had been carried out by people who had been trained in Iraq. In a PBS special on US television, a man identified only "an Iraqi Lieutenant General", claimed that in 2000 he had been "the security officer in charge of the unit" at Salman Pak and had seen Arab students being taught how to hijack airliners using a Boeing 707 fuselage at Salman Pak. The independent Iraqi weekly Al-Yawm Al-Aakher interviewed a former Iraqi officer who also claimed that Salman Pak was being used to train foreign terrorists. {Link without Title} CREDIBILITY OF DEFECTORS Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior U.S. official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak.[http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact][http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0316-02.htm] The credibility of the defectors has been questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for an invasion of Iraq.[http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0316-02.htm] "The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war," said Helen Kennedy of the '' New York Daily News ''.[http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp] Abu Zeinab al-Ghurairy A key source for the claims of terror training at Salman Pak was Iraqi defector "Abu Zeinab" al-Ghurairy. A man claiming to be al-Ghurairy gave interviews to the '' New York Times '' and PBS 's Frontline claiming that he had witnessed foreign fighters training to hijack airplanes. Ghurairy told the ''New York Times'' "We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States." In 2006, however, Jack Fairweather reported in '' Mother Jones '' that "the Ghurairy who met with the Times and PBS was actually a former Iraqi sergeant, then living in Turkey and known by the code name Abu Zainab. The real Lt. General Ghurairy, it seems, had never left Iraq." Fairweather tracked down Ghurairy in Iraq: During the 20-minute interview, in which he grew increasingly angry and suspicious, Ghurairy said he had been the commandant of the Suwara military base from 1993 to 2000 and had never worked at the Salman Pak military facility. He also said he had never spoken to U.S. intelligence agents or Western journalists: “I have never met these people. I have not left Iraq,” Ghurairy told Mother Jones, adding that he had not been aware that a man claiming to be him had been quoted in U.S. newspapers and on television....“I have never met these people!” he repeated with considerable agitation. “I have not left Iraq. The people who say this were trying to use my name to make war!” HISTORY AND GOVERNMENTAL STATEMENTS United Nations In November 2001 Charles Duelfer , then an UNSCOM weapons inspector, also said that Iraqi officials also claimed that the facility was for counterterrorism, but after witnessing the drills performed there he “automatically took out the word 'counter'" dismissing the claim as a fraud [http://politics.guardian.co.uk/archive/article/0,,4296646,00.html]. Weapons inspector Richard Sperzel clarified that the dismissal was not backed up by any evidence: "Many of us had our own private suspicions... We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp."[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40B1FF9355D0C7B8CDDA80994D9404482] Former UN inspector Scott Ritter elaborated on what is known about the camp in an interview in August 2002: Iraqi defectors have been talking lately about the training camp at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. They say there's a Boeing aircraft there. That's not true... They say there are railroad mock-ups, bus mock-ups, buildings, and so on. These are all things you'd find in a hostage rescue training camp, which is what this camp was when it was built in the mid-1980s with British intelligence supervision. In fact, British SAS special operations forces were sent to help train the Iraqis in hostage rescue techniques. Any nation with a national airline and that is under attack from terrorists — and Iraq was, from Iran and Syria at the time — would need this capability. Iraq operated Salman Pak as a hostage rescue training facility up until 1992. In 1992, because Iraq no longer had a functioning airline, and because their railroad system was inoperative, Iraq turned the facility over to the Iraqi Intelligence service, particularly the Department of External Threats. These are documented facts coming out of multiple sources from a variety of different countries. The Department of External Threats was created to deal with Kurdistan, in particular, the infusion of Islamic fundamentalist elements from Iran into Kurdistan. So, rather than being a camp dedicated to train Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, it was a camp dedicated to train Iraq to deal with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. And they did so. Their number one target was the Islamic Kurdish party, which later grew into Al Ansar. ... Ansar comes out of Iran and is supported by Iranians. Iraq, as part of their ongoing war against Islamic fundamentalism, created a unit specifically designed to destroy these people. Jack Fairweather notes that senior Iraqi military officers have confirmed Ritter's explanation of the purpose of the Salman Pak facility, indicating "that while Iraq’s special forces did train to retake hijacked airplanes at the Salman Pak facility, such training was routine for any elite combat unit. Foreign fighters were housed with the Fedayeen Saddam—whose main headquarters were at the Suwara facility—but only in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, not back in 2001." {Link without Title} United States Military On April 6 , 2003 , CENTCOM spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, told reporters that the Iraqis defending the camp were not run of the mill soldiers. "The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak.". Brooks also added that "some of them come from Sudan, some from Egypt, some from other places . . . It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations," {Link without Title} Statements in popular publications New Yorker Seymour Hersh , writing in the '' New Yorker '', reported that he spoke separately to "a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst" and both said that the camp had been built with the assistance of the United Kingdom 's MI6 in the late 1980s "not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training." The former CIA official thought it unlikely that a plane would be required for training in hijacking, but that "to take one back you have to practice on the real thing." Weekly Standard On January 16 , 2006 , a writer for the conservative publication, The Weekly Standard , Stephen F. Hayes , asserted that, "The former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion . . . The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi , and Salman Pak . . . 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."[http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/550kmbzd.asp] Hayes claims this is shown in the approximately 50,000 documents that have been translated so far, out of a group of some 2,000,000 documents seized. Hayes reports that, "The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed . . . by eleven U.S. government officials." In an interview with Tony Snow on January 11, Dick Cheney said "And Steve Hayes is of the view -- and I think he's correct -- that a lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda organization," attributing the opinion about the unevaluated documents to Hayes rather than the eleven officials. Hayes cites no specific document for this particular claim. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has begun publishing the doucments online.[http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/atoz-docex.htm] CONSENSUS VIEW No evidence has been disclosed about any intelligence finds at the camp after its capture, leading some to doubt that anything was found. According to Douglas MacCollam, a journalist for the Columbia Journalism Review , "the consensus view now is that the camp was what Iraq told UN weapons inspectors it was — a counterterrorism training camp for army commandos." {Link without Title} EXTERNAL LINKS
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