Here's an old article I read a while back:
If these assertions were true about Salman Pak, you would think that it would have been an early target to be secured and guarded by US occupation forces early on in the invasion. Also, I would look into the original source of that article/email that you posted that your Bushbot co-worker gave you. Looks like it might contain the same misinformation that has been spread in the past about Salman Pak that this article discusses.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0316-02.htm Iraqi exile group fed false information to news media
~snip~
WASHINGTON - The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed much of the same information to leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines in the United States, Britain and Australia.
~snip~
Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.
In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.
~snip~
Many articles quoted defectors as saying that Saddam was training extremists from throughout the Muslim world at Salman Pak, outside Baghdad.
"We certainly have found nothing to substantiate that," said a senior U.S. official.
~snip~
An Oct. 12, 2001, Washington Post opinion piece by columnist Jim Hoagland quoted an INC-supplied defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, as saying that Salman Pak offered hijacking and assassination courses.
~snip~
Hoagland's column said the defector should not be automatically believed. Hoagland said he wrote it to call attention to "the difficulties that two defectors had in receiving an evaluation from the CIA."
Salman Pak info cont'd at link:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0316-02.htmIt appears Salman Pak was an ANTI-terrorism training facility and the only sources for the distortion that it was a terrorist training facility were friends of Ahmed Chalabi. Anyway, it has also been written about in the New Yorker, as a previous poster noted:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content?040607fa_fact1In February, 2002, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair that a defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy said that he had worked at a terrorist camp in Iraq called Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi fundamentalist Arabs were trained to hijack planes and land helicopters on moving trains. He also asserted that Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. Rose noted the I.N.C. had sponsored Qurairy, and wrote that an aide of Chalabis served as the translator for the defector.
On November 12, 2001, the I.N.C. provided another defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, to the press through a video feed from London. Lami, who was described as a former colonel in Saddams Army, claimed that Islamic militants were training at Salman Pak. He also said that the training camp was contaminated by anthrax, an accusation that was made soon after the U.S. began investigating incidents of anthrax poisoning in New York, Florida, and elsewhere. Stories about Lami subsequently appeared in the Washington Times, the Seattle Times, and other papers. Since the overthrow of Saddam, no foreign terrorist-training camps have been found in Iraq.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_factIn separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. 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. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britains MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. "We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison," the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplanewhich appeared to be used for counter-terrorism trainingwhen they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. "Thats Hollywood rinky-dink stuff," the former agent said. "They train in basements. You dont need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing."
Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war.
_____________________________________________________________________
With regard to the Tuwaitha nuclear facility and Iraq's nuclear capabilities, here are some good links that show the history and recommendations from some groups who have been on top of this for some time. Unfortunately, it requires a great deal of reading to sort through to the specifics of what relates to your post.
I think when responding to this sort of misinformation and hyperbole, it is important to recognize that, historically, records did show that Saddam had weapons and materials, and proved to be quite a menace, hence the continued weapons inspections and sanctions. Also, the exaggerated threat and
uncertainty as to the extent of his weapons date back to pre-Gulf War times. The questions then become to what degree was he prepared to use them, did he have the capability to use them, was it an immediate threat (a lot of this info and stats date back to Gulf War), did he have connections to 9/11, was a pre-emptive attack the best solution or would
more strict and serious weapons inspections the better solution, etc.? For instance, most records show that operations at the Tuwaitha facility were terminated as a result of the Gulf War (1991) and was essentially destroyed or rendered inoperable subsequently by IAEA inspectors. See:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:m651BKrqJcYJ:www.carnegieendowment.org/pdf/npp/16-Iraq.pdf+Bulletin+of+Atomic+Scientists+Iraq+Tuwaitha+nuclear+facility&hl=enHere is a link to various related articles:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:Hu_t0NSxHygJ:cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/+Leonard+Spector+Iraq+nuclear+threat&hl=en______________________
And here are some articles that relate to the second part of your co-workers claims:
United Nations nuclear officials were in apparent disagreement with Washington over U.S. claims that it had the proper authority to transfer highly radioactive material from Iraq last month.
~snip~
In 1992, after the first Gulf War, all highly enriched uranium — which could be used to make nuclear weapons — was shipped from Iraq to Russia, the IAEA's Zlauvinen said.
After 1992, roughly 2 tons of natural uranium, or yellow cake, some low enriched uranium and some depleted uranium was left at Tuwaitha under IAEA seal and control, he said.
So were radioactive items used for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes, which Iraq was allowed to keep under a 1991 U.N. Security Council resolution, Zlauvinen said.
IAEA inspectors left Iraq just before last year's U.S.-led war. After it ended, Washington barred U.N. weapons inspectors from returning, deploying U.S. teams instead in a search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That search has been unsuccessful so far.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:e7nBH1peOQ0J:www.ransac.org/Projects%2520and%2520Publications/News/Nuclear%2520News/2004/782004105505AM.html+in+July+2004,+the+U.S.+government+announced+it+had+transferred+the+nearly+2+tons+of+enriched+uranium+found+in+Iraq+to+an+undisclosed+location+in+the+United+States&hl=enFrom that same link above:
Iraqi 'dirty bomb' risk dismissed - The UN's atomic watchdog says it is confident there is not enough radioactive material missing in Iraq to make a nuclear "dirty bomb".
BBC News
7/7/2004
Vilmos Cserveny, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: "We don't have concerns about any missing uranium" in Iraq.
~snip~
A statement from the US energy department (DOE) on Tuesday said 20 of its laboratory experts had repackaged "less sensitive" nuclear materials that would remain in Iraq.
Such materials could be used for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes, it said.
Al-Tuwaitha - dismantled in the early 1990s under UN ceasefire resolutions - played a key role in Iraq's drive to build nuclear weapons prior to the 1991 Gulf war.
The 1,000 "sources" evacuated in the Iraqi operation included a "huge range" of radioactive items used for medical and industrial purposes, a spokesman for the US National Nuclear Security Administration told AP news agency.
And, from the same link above:
~snip~
The transfer of the radioactive materials out of Baghdad was no doubt carried out with military precision; however there have been reports that it might have been too little too late.
In the weeks immediately after U.S. forces entered the Iraqi capital, the near absence of any kind of weapon of mass destruction -- nuclear, chemical or biological -- became frantically and painfully obvious.
The inability of coalition forces to thus far find much other than some stockpiles of chemical shells dating back to the Iran-Iraq War stirred up a political hornet's nest of accusations that the Bush administration cooked up a weapons of mass destruction scare in order to justify the deadly invasion. Lost amid the brouhaha was the more-ominous speculation that Saddam's nukes had been hidden or smuggled to Iran or some other country with a government hostile to the Western world.
Reports from embedded reporters entering Baghdad revealed disturbing evidence that the nuclear research center had been left unguarded for several days and that looters had roamed the area at will.
According to The Washington Post, U.S. troops discovered that the door to one of the storage rooms for radioactive materials had been breached, but it was impossible to tell what might have been taken. Further surveys revealed the presence of radiation, indicating that either the place was falling apart or radioactive materials had recently been moved around.
~snip~
A timeline of inspections:
http://nti.org/e_research/e3_27a.htmlGood luck. It's just not as black and white as the right wing Bushbots want it to be. It's much more complicated than that, IMHO.
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