SCOTT RITTER TAKES REPORTERS TO ALLEGED `TERRORIST TRAINING SITE' IN IRAQ.

Yahoo! News Message Boards Business News: "Salman Pak was NOT used to train terrorsists and there was NO PROOF that it ever was.

Reuters, September 10, 2002
SCOTT RITTER TAKES REPORTERS TO ALLEGED `TERRORIST TRAINING SITE' IN IRAQ.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter went with Western reporters to the
Salman Pak facility near Baghdad, which an Iraqi defector claimed was being
used to train terrorists in hijacking techniques, sabotage, urban warfare,
etc. The defector's claims were published in the New York Times last
December.

Ritter said that the site was used to 'train Iragi elite forces in hostage
rescue techniques.' An old, beat up Iraqi Airlines Boeing 707 is parked at
the site, and it used for training anti-hijacking squads. Ritter said he had
visited it many times when he was a UN weapons inspector, and that it was of
no interest. He said it was constructed in the 1980s with British
assistance, and that the U.S. government knows this.

'America cannot go to war because this airplane is parked in this place, and
some Iraqi defectors claim it was used to train the hijackers of Sept. 11,'
Ritter said.



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SEYMOUR M. HERSH
SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE (Cont'd)
Wed Jun 18 16:45:28 2003
208.152.73.27

The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any
of al-Haideri's claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on
the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, noted that
his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help
of ground-penetrating radar equipment. 'No underground facilit"