Additional information on Salman Pak:
The Salman Pak (al-Salman) facility was a top secret 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. The facility grounds comprised approximately 20 square kilometres, was completely fenced in and the perimeter was patrolled by armed guards 24 hours a day.
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.
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.
Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, investigated this claim. He 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." Standard counter-hijacking methods, since Operation Entebbe, involve distracting the hijackers and drawing them into the cockpit while simultaneously entering the body of the jet by surprise.
Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was also claimed that Salman Pak was at one time the central facility or a major facility in a biological warfare program.
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