oldreliable67 said:
Salman Pak links:
GlobalSecurity.org
Pre-war. Yes, there are lots of stuff about how Salmon Pak was a terrorist training camp, before the invasion.
NationalReview said this:
This is a report upon the initial seizure of the camp. The claim that it was a terrorist training camp was based on pre-war intellegence (and we know how accurate that was) that this was a terrorist training based again based on pre-war assessments.
But they were looking ....
"We're trying to find anything of intel value, to see how they train and possibly their terrorist tactics," Gunnery Sergeant Scott Stalker — the 7th Marines' 28-year-old intelligence chief from Baypoint, California — told the AP.
So we should find later reports of the evidence they found at the camp showing it was used to train terrorists, right? After all, proof that Hussein trained foreign terrorists would be justification for the war, based on Hussein being a terrorist supporting state.
PBS link, where, when questioned about the purpose of Saddam's fighters training at Salman Pak, an interviewee said this:
Pre-war statements of an ex-pat, obviously biased against Saddam. We know how accurate their intel has been.
Repitition of the same; claims of Iraqi ex-pats.
...disclaimer: I have no clue as to the veracity of this guy being interviewed. Never heard of him, before or since. Make up your own minds.
There are a lot more links, just google "Salman Pak".
I have done this, because if it was verified this was a terrorist training facility, it would support the basis for the invasion. There are tons of stuff about pre-war claims about the Salmon Pak and that it was a terrorist training site. And there are a few articles from April 2003, right when the marines took it. After that .... *poof* almost nothing. Where were the articles with pictures and documents and evidence of all the terrorist training that supposedly went on there?
After spending a couple hours wading through the stuff one time, I found these reports:
In fact, though some U.S. intelligence officials before the U.S. invasion believed Hussein was training terrorists at Salman Pak, The New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh -- an investigative reporter and frequent O'Reilly Factor guest -- reported in the May 12, 2003, New Yorker that Salman Pak was probably a counter-terrorism training center built in the 1980s with U.S. support:
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. ...
[Hersh then explained the differences between terrorist and counter-terrorist training and evidence for the conclusion about Salman Pak.]
Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6, 2003. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war.
On March 2, 2004, Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay, and John Walcott of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reported the same thing: "Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility."
http://mediamatters.org/items/200409280011
Salman Pak, a facility matching al-Janabi’s description, was captured by US Marines in Mid April of 2003 [82], but no evidence of al Qaeda presence at the camp has been found. Some claim that the camp was actually a counterterrorism facility built by the British in the mid 1980's but UN weapons inspectors, including Charles Duelfer believed it had been converted from its original purpose and was being used to train militants. [83] Inconsistencies in the stories of the Iraqi defectors have led U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. Al-Janabi and other Iraqi defectors who tell this story are associated 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 regime change ([84]). "The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war," said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News. "The really damaging stories all came from those guys, not the CIA. They did a really sophisticated job of getting it out there."[85] One senior U.S. official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak.[86]
http://www.1-electric.com/articles/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
In a chapter entitled "Saddam Hussein’s Support for International Terrorism," the White House paper claimed that, "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." This allegation came from two INC-supplied defectors, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a former Iraqi army captain, and Brig. Gen. Abu Zeinab al Quairy, the purported commander of the training facility. Both men were rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence professionals. Nevertheless, the White House published their claims. Their claims, including suggestions that the September 11 hijackers may have been trained at the alleged facility, also appeared in the American and British media. After the invasion, the only training facility found at Salman Pak was determined by U.S. officials to have been used by Iraqi counter-terrorism units.
http://www.basicint.org/iraq_update.htm
I don't vouch of the accuracy of these claim, either. On the other hand, I found nothing the contradicts them. Maybe you can.
