To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (386775 ) 4/6/2003 8:38:23 PM From: RON BL Read Replies (4) | Respond to of 769667 Saddam's 9/11 Hijack Training Camp Destroyed A South Baghdad terrorist training facility used before the 9/11 attacks to train al-Qaeda recruits to hijack American airliners using small knives was attacked by U.S. forces Saturday night. "The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force raided a training camp near Salman Pak and destroyed it," U.S. Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks told reporters Sunday morning. "We believe it had been used to train foreign fighters not from Iraq," he added, in some of the first comments by a U.S. official hinting that Saddam Hussein's regime was training terrorists from other countries. "The nature of the work being done by some of those people we captured, their inferences about the type of training they received, all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak," Gen. Brooks explained, according to a report by the Press Association Limited. Salman Pak has been named in a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed by families of Sept. 11 victims against Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In February, three Salman Pak defectors and two U.N. weapons inspectors, along with former CIA Director James Woolsey, were called to testify about the hijacking school. Although the testimony has not been made public, Capt. Sabah Khodad, a former Iraqi intelligence officer who had worked at Salman Pak in 1994 and 1995, told the London Observer that when he saw the World Trade Center attack, he immediately thought, "This has been done by graduates of Salman Pak." Commenting on Salman Pak's destruction, Maj. Robert Bevelaqua (Ret.) told Fox News Channel on Sunday: "That was a key site for us to go after because it blatantly shows the Iraqi regime embraces and teaches and indoctrinates their guys in terrorism. The fact that we had overhead imagery a year ago or so that showed a civilian airliner that they were using [to rehearse hijackings] really just kind of smacked of terrorism." Bevelaqua noted that forces manning Salman Pak who were killed in Saturday night's attack included non-Iraqis from countries such as Yemen, Jordan, Iran and Syria. The CIA had largely dismissed reports by Khodad and other Salman Pak defectors who claimed that the camp's hijack trainees were recruited from throughout the Middle East.