It was falsely assessed by United States military intelligence to be a key center of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs.
[2][3] The facility was discussed in the leadup 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.
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.
[10] 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.
[12][13] 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.
Yet the DIA's postwar exploitation of the facility found "no information from Salman Pak that links al-Qa'ida with the former regime."
In fact, U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques.
He and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE's attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Since the original broadcast, Khodada has not publicly addressed questions that have been raised about his account of activities at Salman Pak.
In 2006, however, Jack Fairweather reported in Mother Jones that "the Ghurairy who met with the Times and PBS was actually a former Iraqi sergeant, then living in Turkey and known by the code name Abu Zainab.
I have not left Iraq,” Ghurairy told Mother Jones, adding that he had not been aware that a man claiming to be him had been quoted in U.S. newspapers and on television....“I have never met these people!” he repeated with considerable agitation.
He wrote: Iraqi defectors have been talking lately about the training camp at Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.
Iraq, as part of their ongoing war against Islamic fundamentalism, created a unit specifically designed to destroy these people.
In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty- five people.
[9]Writing under the penname Gayle Rivers, former Special Air Service (SAS) reservist Raymond Brooks described his experiences of training Iraqi commandos on the oxbow island during the early 1980s.
"[22] On September 30, 2004, Charles Duelfer released his findings of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Structure of M14: Special Operations Department, composed of a foreign and a domestic section, performed government-sanctioned assassinations inside or outside of Iraq.
[23]Duelfer's report also suggests that Salman Pak may have been used by Saddam to train loyalists and foreign fighters for the planned Iraq insurgency.
In June 2006, CIA told the Committee that: There was information developed after OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) that indicated terrorists were trained at Salman Pak; there was an apparent surge of such reporting.
As was the case with the prewar reporting, the postwar sources provided few details, and it is difficult to conclude from their second-hand accounts whether Iraq was training al-Qa'ida members, as opposed to other foreign nationals.
Postwar exploitation of Salman Pak has yielded no indications that training of al-Qa'ida linked individuals took place there, and we have no information from detainees on this issue
A November 2003 assessment from DIA noted that postwar exploitation of the facility found it "devoid of valuable intelligence."
"[26] The CIA and DIA both told the Committee that their postwar exploration of the facility "has yielded no indications that training of al-Qa'ida linked individuals took place there.
In June 2006, the DIA told the Committee that it has 'no credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak after 1991.