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To: GST who wrote (154012)	3/8/2003 10:26:08 AM
From: Victor Lazlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Friday, March 7, 2003 1:57 p.m. EST CIA's Woolsey Tells Court: Iraq Involved in 9/11 Former CIA Director James Woolsey offered bombshell testimony this week in a lawsuit brought by the families of World Trade Center victims that implicates Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks. The one-time Clinton administration intelligence chief described what he said was a conspiracy between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. As evidence he offered accounts from Iraqi defectors who have described a Boeing 707 jet parked on the ground at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak. The plane, the eyewitnesses insist, was used as a hijacking school prior to 9/11. Since 1995 Saddam's most elite terror operatives had allegedly used Salman Pak to train al-Qaeda recruits to overcome U.S. flight crews using methods employed on 9/11, according to London's Observer newspaper. In November 2001, dozens of other reports, including several in the New York Times, covered news of Saddam's Salman Pak hijacking school based on the defectors' accounts. "I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge between [al-Qaeda and Iraq] was involved here," Woolsey told a Manhattan federal court on Monday, according to the New York Daily News. He compared the relationship between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's terror network to two Mafia families "who hate each other, kill each other from time to time but are still capable of working together against a common enemy," according to testimony quoted by the Associated Press. At the very least, Saddam Hussein is guilty of aiding and abetting the activities of al-Qaeda, Woolsey contended. He also offered evidence suggesting that Baghdad had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. A July 21, 2001, article in an Egyptian newspaper, headlined "America, an Obsession with Osama bin Laden," indicated that Baghdad knew what was coming less than months later, the former U.S. intelligence chief told the court. The report, written by an Iraqi, predicted bin Laden would target both New York City and the Pentagon. Woolsey noted a line in the story warning that bin Laden would "strike America on the arm that is already hurting," explaining that the phrase was likely a reference to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. No Iraqi journalist would write such a report without his government's knowledge and approval, Woolsey testified.

To: GST who wrote (154012)	3/8/2003 10:38:21 AM
From: Victor Lazlo	Respond to of 164684

Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2002 10:55 a.m. EDT Salman Pak: Iraq's Smoking Gun Link to 9-11? With all the talk about how little evidence the Bush administration has tying Saddam Hussein to the 9-11 attacks, we're more than a little surprised at how quickly reporters, not to mention the White House, seem to have forgotten about Salman Pak. That's the name of the Iraqi training camp located south of Baghdad where, according to the accounts of at least two Iraqi defectors quoted in the New York Times last November, terrorists from around the world rehearsed airline hijackings aboard a parked Boeing 707 that bore an eerie resemblance to what transpired on 9-11. "We could see them train around the fuselage," one of the defectors, a five-year veteran of the camp, told the paper. "We could see them practice taking over the plane." And that's not all. A few days before the Times report, the London Observer revealed that one of the defectors, a colonel with the Iraqi intelligence service Mukhabarat, had drawn an even more direct link to 9-11. The former Iraqi agent, codenamed Zeinab, told the paper that one of the highlights of Salman Pak's six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. Like the Sept. 11 hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five, he explained. Zeinab's story has since been corroborated by Charles Duelfer, the former vice chairman of Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspection team, who actually visited the Salman Pak camp several times. "He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors," the Observer reported. "The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counterterrorist training." "Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained. "I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect?" Unlike the other parts of Salman Pak, Zeinab told the Observer that there was a foreigners' camp that was controlled directly by Saddam Hussein. "It was a nightmare! A very strange experience," the Iraqi agent said. "These guys would stop and insist on praying to Allah five times a day when we had training to do. The instructors wouldn't get home till late at night, just because of all this praying." A second defector said that conversations with the hijacker-trainees made it 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," he added chillingly. "The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this." Though the Bush administration has been largely silent about Salman Pak, former CIA Director James Woolsey is apparently convinced it was used to rehearse Sept. 11-style hijackings. In late November he told Fox News Channel's Laurie Dhue: "We know that at Salman Pak, on the southern edge of Baghdad, five different eyewitnesses - three Iraqi defectors and two American U.N. inspectors - have said - and now there are aerial photographs to show it - a Boeing 707 that was used for training of hijackers, including non-Iraqi hijackers trained very secretly to take over airplanes with knives." Another intriguing coincidence: Salman Pak's hijacking school reportedly opened for business in 1995, the same year al-Qaeda agents in the Philippines hatched a plot to hijack 12 airliners and slam some of them into U.S. landmarks. If America's press is looking for smoking-gun evidence tying Iraq to the 9-11 attacks, Saddam Hussein's hijack school for Islamic terrorists is as good as it's likely to get.

To: GST who wrote (154012)	3/8/2003 10:52:22 AM
From: Victor Lazlo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, an Iraqi military officer, defected from Iraq in 1999 to Turkey. He now lives in Fort Worth, Texas. When he was debriefed, he described his training mission at Salman Pak, a military base about 21 miles from Baghdad that had been used for the testing of secret weapons, including chemical biological warfare agents, and paramilitary training for covert actions. Captain Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami said that as late as 1998 he trained an elite commando team, Fedayeen Saddam, in airline hijacking and sabotage. Through a translator, Mr. Alami described, according to the Wall street Journal, a daily regimen of exercises on kidnapping, assassination, and -- using a Boeing 707 parked inside the complex -- how to hijack a plane or bus without weapons. He said that a separate group of non-Iraqis were being similarly trained by Saddam's intelligence service, the mukhabarat. Asked about the plane by an interviewer for Front Line, he said "Yes, there's a real whole 707 plane, a whole real plane, standing in the middle of the training area in this camp." Subsequently, a second Iraqi defector, a former intelligence officer who defected in early 2001 , described "Islamicists" training on a Boeing 707 parked in Salman Pak from about 1995 to as recently as September 2000. Neither defector said any efforts were made to hide or conceal the Boeing from satellite photography. And, according to Front Line, a former U.N. inspector who worked for the United Nations said that he saw the fuselage of an airliner at Salman Pak which was smaller than a Boeing. Whatever manufacture and size , there is agreement such a plane was in the Salman Pak complex.

To: GST who wrote (154012)	3/8/2003 11:07:34 AM
From: Victor Lazlo	Respond to of 164684

Smoking guns ... smoking guns.. .. smoking guns.. do you want more, or have I provided enough for one day ? After your service in the army, you worked for a secret part of the Iraqi government? Some of it is not very secretive. But there's another part, which has a lot to do with international terrorism and this kind of operation -- this is very secretive. What kind of training went on, and who was being trained? Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism. And the training also included how to prepare for suicidal operations. For example, they will train them how to belt themselves around with explosives, and jump in a place and explode themselves out as part of the suicidal training. I think the trainings of the Arabs was much harsher, and much stricter, than the training of the Iraqis. Why? Because we know that Arabs, non-Iraqis who come to train in these kind of camps, are going to be sent to very dangerous and important operations outside Iraq; not inside Iraq. And they will be conducting very specific operations and dangerous operations in their own cities, or in their own countries, or other countries all over the world. Those Arabs are real volunteers. They come in small numbers, and they come with the intention to do some real suicidal operations. ... pbs.org