Time Magazine reveals Cheney's secret hiding place!

B-Bob · Jun 16, 2004

Well Iran has much more credible connections to Al Qaeda, according to the report. Oh crap. If we invaded Iraq based on the "evidence" presented, I guess we can gear up for Iran. That will be pretty and inexpensive to boot.

FranchiseBlade · Jun 16, 2004

My impression of salmon pak is that it had nothing to do with the training of Al Qaeda operatives. Ironically that is the same conclusion that the 9/11 commission came to. The airplanes that the hijackers looked for were 767's and I think 757's?. They weren't 707's, and I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the techniques taught at the salmon pak facility and who they were taught to.

By the way remember Charles Taylor and Liberia? They had more connections with Al Qaeda than Iraq did as well.

GladiatoRowdy · Jun 17, 2004

Originally posted by basso
Salman Pak contains a complete 707 fuselage, just sitting in the desert. there is documented evidence they've used it to train terrorists to hijack airplanes w/ knives.
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If this WERE true, I am certain it would have found its way into the 9/11 commission report, which by all accounts, it hasn't.

Originally posted by basso

this isn't a republican right wing fantasy.
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The only people with stories about this place are right wing websites and bloggers. The 9/11 commission did not find the "evidence" you speak of credible or they would have included it in the report. It appears that it certainly could be a republican right wing fantasy.

Originally posted by basso

the plane is there. doesn't it at least pique your curiosity, or make you think "hmmmm, that is weird, and the coincidence with what happened on 9/11 is kinda striking?"
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It is mildly interesting, but had Al Qaeda operatives trained in Iraq before 9/11, it would have been somewhere between difficult and impossible to hide and as such, would have been documented and brought to light by the 9/11 commission.

What do bloggers and GOP pundits know that the 9/11 commission (made up of the same numbers of Dems and Reps) does not?

SamFisher · Jun 18, 2004

Originally posted by basso
Salman Pak contains a complete 707 fuselage, just sitting in the desert. there is documented evidence they've used it to train terrorists to hijack airplanes w/ knives. this isn't a republican right wing fantasy. the plane is there. doesn't it at least pique your curiosity, or make you think "hmmmm, that is weird, and the coincidence with what happened on 9/11 is kinda striking?"
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707 - I mean Tupelov -- I mean whatever will make you guys invade!

Many articles quoted defectors as saying that Saddam was training extremists from throughout the Muslim world at Salman Pak, outside Baghdad.

"We certainly have found nothing to substantiate that," said a senior U.S. official.

Instead, he said, U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Iraqi counterterrorism units practiced anti-hijacking techniques on an aircraft fuselage at the site.

An Oct. 12, 2001, Washington Post opinion piece by columnist Jim Hoagland quoted an INC-supplied defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, as saying that Salman Pak offered hijacking and assassination courses.

The article, which urged the Bush administration to examine possible Iraqi complicity in Sept. 11, said Alami was a former military instructor and ex-army captain whom the INC tracked down to Fort Worth, Texas, where he settled in May 2001 as a refugee.

Hoagland's column said the defector should not be automatically believed. Hoagland said he wrote it to call attention to "the difficulties that two defectors had in receiving an evaluation from the CIA."

In a Nov. 11 story in the Observer of London by David Rose, Alami was quoted as saying that "the method used on 11 September perfectly coincides with the training I saw at the camp."

The article said Alami was assigned to Salman Pak between 1994 and 1995.

However, a Nov. 8, 2001, New York Times article said Alami worked at Salman Pak for eight years.

The Oct. 12, 2001, Washington Post piece also cited an INC claim that an unnamed former Iraqi intelligence officer claimed that "Islamists" were trained at Salman Pak on a U.S.-made Boeing 707.

In a later article, which appeared to be based on an interview with the same man, the aircraft was identified as an old Russian-made Tupolev.

That defector complained in The Washington Post column that CIA interrogators in Ankara had treated him "dismissively" earlier that week.

The Nov. 8, 2001, New York Times article featured an interview in an unidentified Middle East country that was arranged by the INC with an unidentified Iraqi lieutenant general who said he'd been interviewed by the CIA in Ankara the previous month.

He and an unidentified Iraqi intelligence service sergeant claimed they worked at Salman Pak for several years and that trainees were being prepared for attacks on neighboring countries and possibly the United States.

The unnamed lieutenant general appears to have been the defector of the same rank, code-named Abu Zeinab, who was featured in the Nov. 11, 2001, Observer article.

The newspaper said the defector was interviewed by telephone, and that it was also given details of an interview that two London-based INC activists had conducted with Abu Zeinab at a safe house in Ankara, Turkey.

Abu Zeinab claimed that trainees were instructed in hijacking aircraft.

The defector's full name, Abu Zeinab al Qurairy, was revealed in a February 2002 article in Vanity Fair magazine that was also written by Rose, who declined to comment.

The defector said the Islamists at Salman Pak pledged to obey orders to carry out suicide attacks and that those who flunked training were "used as targets in live-ammunition exercises."

Al Qurairy said in one exercise, students had to land helicopters on a speeding train and then hijack it.
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"Documented evidence?" If by "documented" you mean published lies....I guess that's right.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8194211.htm

"Al Qurairy said in one exercise, students had to land helicopters on a speeding train and then hijack it."

Somebody's been watching too many movies.

I can't believe we fell for this crap.

basso · Jun 18, 2004

Originally posted by SamFisher
707 - I mean Tupelov -- I mean whatever will make you guys invade!

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plains, trains, and automobiles:

http://weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/768rwsbj.asp?pg=1

Al-Shamari said that importing foreign fighters to train in Iraq was part of his job in the Mukhabarat. The fighters trained in Salman Pak, a facility located some 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. He said that he had personal knowledge of 500 fighters that came through Salman Pak dating back to the late 1990s; they trained in "urban combat, explosives, and car bombs." This account agrees with a White House Background Paper on Iraq dated September 12, 2002, which cited the "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."
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basso · Jun 18, 2004

Originally posted by SamFisher

I can't believe we fell for this crap.
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i can't believe how, rather than an honest attept at finding out the truth (which apparently you can't handle), joyously you attempt to debunk anything that might raise doubt in the mind of eli pariser.

basso · Jun 18, 2004

http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040703.asp

Confirming that Operation Iraqi Freedom is an integral part of the war on terror, soldiers of the 7th Marine Regiment destroyed a suspected terrorist camp early Sunday en route to Baghdad. Located a mile east of the Tigris River, the Salman Pak base was exactly where U.S. terrorism experts and Iraqi defectors said it would be.

Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, Clinton Iraqi policy adviser Laurie Mylroie, former Iraqi nuclear chief Khidir Hamza and émigré Iraqi army colonel Sabah Khodada are among those who say that Saddam Hussein used Salman Pak to instruct terrorists in bomb making, assassination, and hijacking (see "The 9/11 Connection"). Key to this objective was an airplane fuselage in which Islamic extremists honed their air-piracy skills. Initial reports from the camp vindicate those suspicions.

"The rusted shell of an old passenger jet sat out in a field, its tail broken off," an Associated Press dispatch reported Sunday. "Good for hijacking practice, U.S. Marines speculated Sunday as they examined an Iraqi training base about 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad."

Nessman added: "The passenger plane's sun-bleached fuselage lay alone in a large, barren field. A fire engine sat at one intersection. Elsewhere, the twisted metal wreck of a double-decker bus stood near three decrepit green and red train cars." These latter details bolster charges that Salman Pak also showed terrorists how to seize buses and trains.

The Marines shelled then entered Salman Pak — named after a 7th Century Persian convert to Islam who was the prophet Mohammed's barber — after it was discussed by Egyptian and Sudanese fighters caught elsewhere in Iraq.

As the U.S. Army's stoic and crisp Brigadier General Vincent Brooks told reporters Sunday, "The nature of the work being done by some of those people that we captured, their inferences to the type of training that they received, all of these things give us the impression that there was terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak."
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basso · Jun 18, 2004

more:

http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040303.asp

Laurie 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."
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SamFisher · Jun 18, 2004

Originally posted by basso
i can't believe how, rather than an honest attept at finding out the truth (which apparently you can't handle), joyously you attempt to debunk anything that might raise doubt in the mind of eli pariser.
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Basso, the only thing you ever do is quote article after article from the Weekly Standard, NRO, whatever blog, etc incessantly, every single day. When your house of cards starts to collapse (as undeniably large parts of it have -- I can't even begin to begin to catalogue how many of the 100's of articles you have posted have turned out to be untrue, red herrings, or based on faulty info from since-discredited sources) you don't even acknowledge that it happens, you just move on to the next one.

These guys were lying about Salman Pak? OK, I'll find a new guy. Did the Administration f-ck up and feed us bogus info that they shouldn't have trusted. Yes, but it's Tenet's fault because he said "slam dunk" and I'll just ignore everything else. THe President just said "urgent peril", not "imminent threat"....

Do I harbor opinions about these items? yes. Will you be able to change them? Unlikely.

But don't pretend like you're making an "honest attempt at finding out the truth". That is crap. You willfully engage in ad hominem attacks, selective editing, cite exclusively to right wing sources, and threadisappear whenever you get burned on something.

You have a viewpoint, and it's whatever Bush's is on most issues, and you work to spread it by starting thread after thread either pro-bush, or anti-kerry, or some variant therof. But please, don't pretend like you're making an honest attempt to find out the truth, and we're just the fray. You're as partisan as they come; you're almost worse. At least traderjorge, etc is dismissable as a mere troll.

Now, if you want to believe fairy tales about Iraqis hijacking trains from helicopters, that's fine; but I will call it for what it is. Maybe it's partisan for me to say that, maybe it's not; I don't really care. But don't put yourself on a pedestal when you're as covered in it as anybody else here, if not more so.

SamFisher · Jun 18, 2004

Originally posted by basso
more:

http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock040303.asp
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Sorry bassy, but Hamza is one of the guys who was discredited when Chalabi was pushed out. As for Laurie whatshername, she's a joker; her big theory is that Saddam bombed the WTC the first time around in 93. I don't want to get in to why that is farfetched right now, but it makes Chalabi look rock solid by comparison.

Diddn't I already put that it this thread or was it another one?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224824,00.html

Early in the winter of 1994, Chalabi had a visitor from Baghdad named Khidir Hamza, who announced himself as a senior member of Saddam's nuclear weapons team with much to reveal about the ongoing bomb programme being pursued by the dictator under the noses of the UN inspection teams. Chalabi in turn handed him to one of the resident spooks, who contacted Langley to see if they were interested in sponsoring this defector. After quizzing Hamza over the shortwave radio, a CIA nuclear expert at headquarters concluded that Hamza had nothing to offer and declined to assist his passage to the US.

It was a wise decision. As veterans of the Iraqi bomb program have subsequently revealed, Hamza grossly exagerrated his nuclear bombmaking credentials while downplaying the role his Ba'athist connections had played in advancing his scientific career. Imad Khadduri, the Iraqi nuclear physicist in charge of all documentation for the bomb project later scathingly reported that Hamza had a "deep inner fear of radiation" which "prevented him from ever entering the reactor hall or touching any scientific gadgets, probably due to his continual fear of an electric jolt that he experienced as a child". This paranoia, a significant drawback for a nuclear weapons builder, meant that his work was confined to theoretical research, well away from any actual experimentation. "He did not," says Khadduri, "even remotely, get involved in any scientific research, except for journalistic articles, dealing with the fission bomb, its components or its effects."

Cultivating a relationship with Hussein Kamal, Saddam's loutish cousin who was for a period all powerful as head of the weapons programmes and much else beside, Hamza nevertheless served briefly as head of the bomb design team in 1987, before being relegated to a makework job before being sacked, according to Khadduri, for filching air conditioners from the office. He then sank into obscurity before surfacing in Kurdistan in 1994.

Even though the nuclear experts in Langley rejected him as an intelligence source, documents provided by him found their way to the International Atomic Energy Agency's teams investigating the Iraqi bomb programme. Early in 1995, an IAEA "Action Team" descended on the offices of the Iraqi nuclear programme in Baghdad. They had with them a 20-page document that apparently originated from inside "Group 4," the Iraqi government department that had been responsible for designing Saddam's nuclear bomb. The stationery, page numbering, and stamps all appeared authentic, according to one senior member of the Iraqi bomb team.

"It was a 'progress report,'" he recalls, "about 20 pages, on the work in Group 4 departments on the results of their continued work after 1991. It referred to results of experiments on the casting of the hemispheres [ie the bomb core of enriched uranium] with some crude diagrams." As evidence that Iraq was successfully pursuing a nuclear bomb in defiance of sanctions and the inspectors, it was damning. However, after a thorough investigation, the IAEA concluded that the document, as one official recently confirmed to me by email, was "determined not to be authentic." The official later told me on the phone that the document originated with Khidir Hamza, a point confirmed by an Action Team veteran.

The IAEA had an excellent source to confirm that the document was forged - none other than Hamza's old boss, Hussein Kamal. In August, 1995, Kamal, until then considered to be the second most powerful man in Iraq, defected to Jordan. Soon after his arrival, the former Iraqi weapons supremo spoke freely to senior UN inspection officials. In one session, the IAEA's Professor Maurizio Zifferero showed Kamal the document. Kamal, according to the transcript, immediately recognised it as a forgery, a view in which the official concurred, adding that "Dr Khidir Abdul Abbas Hamza is related to this document".

"He is a professional liar," said Kamal. "He worked with us, but he was useless and was always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything."
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