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From: another list
National Review
Deroy Murdoch
April 3, 2003
The 9/11 Connection
What Salman Pak could reveal.
Not far from Baghdad, Coalition forces may uncover evidence linking
Saddam Hussein's regime with airline hijackings in general and the
September 11 attacks in particular.
Salman Pak, a training camp on the Tigris River some 15 miles
southeast of Iraq's capital, could clarify this question. According
to Iraqi defectors and U.S. intelligence analysts, this is where
Hussein's agents polished the air-piracy skills of foreign Islamist
terrorists.
Details on this facility and its al Qaeda ties recently emerged in a
Manhattan federal courtroom. Former CIA Director James Woolsey and
Iraq scholar Laurie Mylroie offered sworn expert testimony in a
largely overlooked lawsuit filed by the families of two people killed
on 9/11. They are suing Iraq's government, among other rogue entities
and individuals, for allegedly helping to murder their loved ones.
"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of
common effort in the sense of aiding or abetting or conspiracy was
involved here between Iraq and the al Qaeda," Woolsey said on March 3.
President Clinton's CIA chief from 1993 to 1995 added: "Even if one
cannot show that...any of the individual 19 hijackers were trained at
Salman Pak, the nature of the training and the circumstances suggest,
to my mind, at least, some kind of common aiding, abetting,
assistance, cooperation � whatever word you might want to take."
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."
"This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world,"
former Iraqi army captain Sabah Khodada told PBS's Frontline in an
October 14, 2001 interview. Khodada worked at Salman Pak. He said
that instruction there was "all for the general concept of hitting and
attacking American targets and American interests." He added: "We saw
people getting trained to hijack airplanes...They are even trained how
to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the
plane...They are trained how to plant horror within the passengers by
doing such actions." A map of the camp Khodada drew for Frontline
closely matches satellite photos of the base, thus bolstering his
story.
"I was the security officer in charge of the unit," at Salman Pak, an
ex-Iraqi lieutenant general told Frontline anonymously in a November
6, 2001 interview. "This unit was under the direct supervision and
control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service," he added. "And the fact
that the training was concentrated on a plane made it even stranger as
far as I was concerned."
Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, denied this to Frontline
that October 29. "I am lucky that I know the area, this Salman Pak.
This is a very beautiful area with gardens, with trees," Aldouri said.
"It is not possible to do such a program there, because there's no
place for planes."
Oddly enough, that satellite photo shows no rose bushes. But clearly
evident is the Russian-built Tupolev 154 airliner on which these Iraqi
emigres report hijackings were rehearsed.
"We were told it was for counterterrorist training," former U.N.
weapons inspector Charles Duelfer said in the Scotsman newspaper on
February 18. "We automatically knocked off the word 'counter.'"
Duelfer and his team saw the jet on a January 1995 visit.
Meanwhile, in a February 24 letter to James Beasley, Jr., the attorney
in the aforementioned lawsuit, Czech U.N. Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek
affirms an October 26, 2001 statement by Czech Interior Minister
Stanislav Gross: "In this moment we can confirm, that during the next
stay of Mr. Muhammad Atta in the Czech Republic there was the contact
with the official of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Al Ani, Ahmed Khalin
Ibrahim Samir, who was on 22nd April 2001 expelled from the Czech
Republic on the basis of activities which were not compatible with the
diplomatic status." Atta flew from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Prague
on April 7, 2001. Car-rental records place him in the Czech capitol
the next day. He flew home to Florida that April 9.
"If he [Atta] goes there and meets with an Iraqi intelligence officer,
and then turns right around and comes right back, it looks an awful
lot to me like it was an operational meeting," Woolsey said in court.
"Certainly he and Mr. Al-Ani were unlikely to be discussing or
looking at the lovely architecture of Medieval Prague."
Czech officials sent Al-Ani packing just two weeks after his meeting
with Atta when they caught the Iraqi casing and photographing Radio
Free Europe's Prague headquarters, some believe in hopes of bombing
it.
Iraq also is tied to the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Chief conspirator Ramzi Yousef reached America bearing an Iraqi
passport, although he fled to Pakistan on a Pakistani passport issued
to one Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani-born resident of Kuwait whose
identity Mylroie surmises that Yousef assumed, perhaps with the help
of Iraqi intelligence agents who had access to immigration files
before U.S. and allied forces drove them from Kuwait.
For his part, Indiana-born and Iraqi-reared Abdul Rahman Yasin �
indicted for mixing the chemicals in the bomb that shook the Twin
Towers, killing six and injuring roughly 1,000 people � returned to
Iraq after the explosion, stopping first at the Iraqi embassy in
Amman, Jordan. He lived freely in Baghdad for a year. Iraqi
officials say they have kept him in custody since 1994, though they
neither have prosecuted him nor extradited him to face American
justice.
Also, according to the State Department's "Patterns of Global
Terrorism � 2001,"released May 21, 2002, "Iraq was the only
Arab-Muslim country that did not condemn the September 11 attacks
against the United States." That day, an official Iraqi broadcast said
America was "...reaping the fruits of [its] crimes against humanity."
Some have dismissed the notion that supposedly secular Saddam Hussein
would conspire with Muslim extremists like Osama bin Laden and the men
of al Qaeda. Woolsey and Mylroie note that Hussein sometimes embraces
Islam for political purposes. The Iraqi flag, for instance, has borne
the Arabic words Allahu akbar ("God is great") since 1991, the year
Hussein lost Gulf War I. Terrorists often invoke this Islamic
incantation before blowing themselves apart. Whatever their
differences on Heaven, Hussein and bin Laden share a common foe on
Earth: America.
Said Woolsey, "I've used the analogy a number of times about the Iraqi
government and al Qaeda as being like two Mafia families who hate each
other, kill each other's members from time to time, insult one
another, but are still capable of cooperating against what they
consider to be a greater enemy � namely, us."
Are these apparent ties tough to prove? You bet. Iraq's work with
homicidal zealots does not resemble a municipal bond deal, with
contracts registered at City Hall. As Woolsey noted, "This is putting
together pieces of a puzzle in which quite likely both parties are
doing everything they can to keep these pieces from being fitted
together."
So why has the Bush administration not highlighted these ominous
connections? One theory is that showcasing pre-9/11 evidence of
Salman Pak might make people wonder why nothing was done about it
before the atrocity. Another view is that federal officials who
implemented President Clinton's light touch towards Iraq are in no
hurry to remind Americans of how foolish their policy was.
In either case, we soon may know much more about Salman Pak �
assuming
it has not been thoroughly sanitized. Baghdad's liberation should
snap open government file cabinets and loosen captured officials'
tongues. Before long, they may reveal the extent of Saddam Hussein's
complicity in the September 11 massacre.
� Mr. Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.
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