Iraq again...

This from the Austin-American Statesman:

Iraq trained terrorists, military defectors say
By Chris Hedges
The New York Times
Thursday, November 8, 2001

Two defectors from Iraqi intelligence said Wednesday that they had worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995.

They said the training in the camp, south of Baghdad, was aimed at carrying out attacks against neighboring countries and possibly Europe and the United States. The defectors said they did not know whether the Islamic militants being trained at the camp, known as Salman Pak, were linked to Osama bin Laden.

One of the defectors was a lieutenant general who had been one of the most senior officers in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat. The other defector was a former Iraqi sergeant in the Mukhabarat who spent nearly five years at the camp.

The men said they had no knowledge of specific attacks carried out by the militants. But they insisted that those being trained as recently as last year were Islamic radicals from across the Middle East.

The assertions of terrorism training by the Iraqi defectors are likely to fuel one side of an intense debate in Washington over whether to extend the war against bin Laden and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan into Iraq.

An interview with the two men was set up by an Iraqi group seeking to overthrow President Saddam Hussein.

The defectors said they knew of a highly guarded compound within the camp where Iraqi scientists, led by a lanky German, produced biological agents.

"There is a lot we do not know," said the former lieutenant general, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years, you see and hear things.

"These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. 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. We were repeatedly told this."

The reports mesh with statements by Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a captain in the Iraqi army who came to Texas in May after working as an instructor for eight years at Salman Pak, located at a bend in the Tigris River.

U.N. arms inspectors suspected that such activities, including simulated hijackings carried out in a Boeing 707 fuselage set up in the camp, were going on at Salman Pak before they were expelled from Iraq in 1998. But this is the first look at the workings of the camp from those who took part in its administration.

Richard Sperzel, former chief of U.N. biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq, said the Iraqis had always told the inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces.
"But many of us had our own private suspicions," he said. "We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp."

The former lieutenant general -- who acknowledged his involvement in some of the worst excesses of Saddam's government, including direct involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after an uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf War -- spent three days in Ankara, Turkey, being interviewed by the CIA and the FBI. American officials confirmed that they had met with the man in Turkey but said they had not learned all that much from him. They said it was unlikely that training on the fuselage at the camp was linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings in the United States.

The camp is overseen by the highest levels of Iraqi intelligence, and those who worked there were compartmentalized into distinct sections. On one side of the camp, the defectors said, young Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddam's Fighters, were trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage.

The other side of the camp, past a small lake, trees and barbed wire, was where the Islamic militants were trained. The militants spent a great deal of time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the 707. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.
"We could see them train around the fuselage," said the former sergeant. "We could see them practice taking over the plane."

The former lieutenant general said the terrorist teams were trained to take over a plane without using weapons. They also were trained in the use of booby-trapped explosive devices and taught how to kill with their hands.

He said that when he questioned Lt. Gen. Jassim Rashid al-Dulaimy, whom he said was overseeing the terrorist training, about the German who worked in the biological unit, he was told that he was "the man who caused all our problems in 1991."

The section where biological agents are said to have been produced was bombed by coalition warplanes during the Gulf War, the defector said.

The report of Iraqi ties with Islamic radicals follows an announcement by the Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, that Mohamed Atta, thought to have been the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, had met in April with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat identified by Czech authorities as an intelligence officer.

There are unexplained gaps and absences, some as long as 15 months, during Atta's stay in Hamburg, Germany, suggesting that he may have been training abroad.

Many of the trainers in the Salman Pak camp are notorious figures in their own right. The chief trainer, Abdel Hussein, nicknamed "The Ghost," was involved in several assassinations outside Iraq, as was al-Dulaimy, who has been implicated in the 1994 assassination in Beirut of an Iraqi opposition leader, Sheik Taleb al-Suhail.

http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/thursday/news_3.html

Hmmm... Training them to take over planes unarmed in groups of 5 or 6. Now why does that sound so familiar?