Salman Pak facility

The Salman Pak, or al-Salman, facility is an Iraqi military facility near Baghdad. It was assessed by United States military intelligence to be a key center of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs. The facility came under American control in early April 2003 when it was captured by U.S. Marines. The facility was then referred to as Forward Operating Base (FOB) Carpenter.

The Salman Pak facility is located approximately 15 miles (24 km) south of Baghdad on a peninsula formed by a broad eastward meander of the Tigris River, near a town also called Salman Pak. The facility grounds comprise approximately 20 square kilometres. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the installation was a key center of Iraq's biological and chemical weapon programs. In 1989 and 1990, the laboratories in the complex researched anthrax, botulinum, clostridium, perfringens, mycotoxins, aflatoxins, and ricin. A special forces training camp at the southernmost point of the shifting land form was also used by the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence) as the headquarters for its Special Operations [14th] Directorate.

The facility was discussed in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to assert that the complex incorporated a purpose-built terrorist training camp; a narrative first promoted by western journalists David Rose and Judith Miller. Internally, both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. A DIA analyst told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the INC "has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa'ida." Reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel noted in November 2005 that "After the war, U.S. officials determined that a facility in Salman Pak was used to train Iraqi anti-terrorist commandos."

Iraqi defectors associated with the INC said that the camp was used by the Mukhabarat to train Iraqi militia groups such as the Fedayeen in use of military small arms, RPGs, assassination, espionage, and counterinsurgency techniques. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, members of the INC asserted that the facility was used to train the hijackers involved. 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 Frontline 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. The independent Iraqi weekly Al-Yawm Al-Aakher interviewed a former Iraqi officer who also claimed that Salman Pak was being used to train foreign terrorists.

Seymour Hersh notes that "Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war." A mass grave containing 150 bodies was found in June 2003. The bodies were apparently executed prisoners who were killed three days before US troops entered Baghdad in April 2003. Douglas MacCollam wrote in the July/August 2004 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review that "There still remain claims and counterclaims about what was going on at Salman Pak. But the consensus view now is that the camp was what Iraq told UN weapons inspectors it was — a counterterrorism training camp for army commandos."

Inconsistencies in the stories of the defectors led some U.S. officials, journalists, and investigators to conclude that the Salman Pak story was inaccurate. One senior U.S. official said that they had found "nothing to substantiate" the claim that al-Qaeda trained at Salman Pak. The credibility of the defectors has been questioned due to their association with the Iraqi National Congress, an organization that has been accused of deliberately supplying false information to the US government in order to build support for an invasion of Iraq. "The INC's agenda was to get us into a war", said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News.

The DIA told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2006 that after Operation Desert Storm, "fabricators and unestablished sources who reported hearsay or thirdhand information created a large volume of human intelligence reporting. This type of reporting surged after September 2001 and continued well after the capture of Salman Pak." Yet the DIA's postwar exploitation of the facility found "no information from Salman Pak that links al-Qa'ida with the former regime." (p. 84)

One of the sources for the claims of terrorist training at Salman Pak was Iraqi defector Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard. Khodada was interviewed by PBS's Frontline, reporting that he had witnessed foreign fighters training to hijack airplanes. Khodada reported, "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." He further stated, "Non-Iraqis were trained separately from us. There were strict orders not to meet with them and not to talk to them. ... They look like they're mostly from the Gulf, sometimes from areas close to Yemen, from their dark skin and short bodies. And they also are Muslims." The Executive Editor of Frontline, Louis Wiley Jr., later acknowledged that its reporting on Salman Pak was inaccurate, but defended the report: "Your readers should know that checking inside Saddam's Iraq at the time of the broadcast on the bona fides of Iraqis who had fled the country was virtually impossible. FRONTLINE did its best to vet the interviews with American officials and hired our own translators. In the broadcast we noted that these two defectors had come to us through the INC, a group whose bias we identified. We quoted an American official who cast doubt on the defectors' claims: 'It is unlikely the training on the 707 is linked to the hijackings of September 11.' We also interviewed the Iraqi Ambassador to the U.N., who told us: 'I know the area, this Salman Pak. . . . It is not possible to do such a program there, because there's no place for planes, for airplanes there.'... The Salman Pak story is a cautionary tale for all of us who are committed to tough investigative reporting." In November 2005, the Editor added the following note to the report on Khodada: