Well well, if it isn’t the disgruntled former staffer of the REAL libertarian scholar Ron Paul. I like that you cite Boortz and Miller as “true” libertarians, and I imagine you’d include Barr/Root and probably Glenn “Bad Actor” Beck as paragons of laissez faire too. I applaud the effort, but *somehow* I just don’t think very many people are buying it.

> We see Islamo-Fascism as the greatest threat to our liberties.

You sound a whole lot like the neocons – is that because you are one? A LINO? Islamo-fascism… what is that, exactly? Islam has virtually no history of fascism, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia. They can’t really claim title to fascism like US/UK can, and one notes they didn’t – it’s a label people like Boortz and Beck spam without evidence.

Now, as you show every indication of wanting to do it, here’s a leather jacket and some water skis – all that remains is the formality to seal that you jumped the shark in 2007. Please crawl back under a heavy rock, and take idiocies like Beck/Boortz/Barr with you.

They hate us for our freedoms, lulz.

Background

The Salman Pak facility is located approximately 15 miles (24 km) south of Baghdad on a peninsula formed by a broad eastward bend 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 facility was used by the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence) as the headquarters for its Special Operations [14th] Directorate. The facility had also been 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.[4][5]

Alleged connections to terrorism

The facility was discussed in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a result of a campaign by Iraqi defectors associated with the Iraqi National Congress to assert that the facility was a terrorist training camp. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has since established that both the CIA and the DIA concluded that there was no evidence to support these claims. A DIA analyst told the Committee, “The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa’ida.” Knight Ridder reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. 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.”[Seattle Times, 1 November 2005, p. A5]. And PBS Frontline – who originally carried many of the allegations of Iraqi defectors – similarly noted that “U.S. officials have now concluded that Salman Pak was most likely used to train Iraqi counter-terrorism units in anti-hijacking techniques.”[6]

Iraqi defectors associated with the INC asserted that the facility was used by the Mukhabarat (Iraqi Intelligence) to train Iraqi militia groups such as the Fedayeen in use of military small arms, RPG’s, assassination, espionage, and counter insurgency techniques [7]. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, members of the Iraqi National Congress promoted claims that the facility was used to train the hijackers. 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 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. [8] A mass grave containing 150 bodies was also found in June 2003. The bodies were apparently executed prisoners who were killed three days before US troops entered Baghdad in April 2003.[9] 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 [that the camp was used for terrorist training].”[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. 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.”[11]Bad Link

Other U.S. officials and journalists have concluded that Salman Pak was used to train foreign (non-Iraqi) fighters for counterterrorism. Douglas Jehl of the “New York Times” reported that Charles A. Duelfer, chief weapons inspector in Iraq, reported that as recently as three months before the March 2003 invasion, “a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service known as M14, the directorate for special operations, oversaw a highly secretive enterprise known as the Challenge Project, involving explosives … [that] trained Iraqis, Palestinians, Syrians, Yemeni, Lebanese, Egyptian and Sudanese operatives in counterterrorism, explosives, marksmanship and foreign operations at its facilities at Salman Pak, near Baghdad.” [12]

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that “Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa’ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qa’ida operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations.”p. 108 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.” (p. 108)

The vote in the committee was nearly unanimous (14-1). Four Republican senators on the committee–three of whom approved the document–complained in an addendum that it was written “with more partisan bias than we have witnessed in a long time in Washington.”

[edit] Credibility of defectors

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.[13][14] 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.[15] “The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war”, said Helen Kennedy of the New York Daily News.[16]

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)

United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

On September 8, 2006, “Phase II” of the Senate Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq was released.[24] On page 83 of the report, the following is stated under the heading “Postwar Information on Salman Pak”:
“ In a response to questions from Committee staff asking if DIA recovered or received information or intelligence, after the raid on Salman Pak in April 2003 that indicated non-Iraqis received terrorist training at the Salman Pak facility, DIA said it has “no credible reports that non-Iraqis were trained to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations at Salman Pak after 1991.” DIA assessed that the foreigners were likely volunteers who traveled to Iraq in the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began to fight overtly alongside Iraqi military forces…DIA said it has “no information from Salman Pak that links al-Qa’ida with the former regime.”

In June 2006, CIA told the Committee that: There was information developed after OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedem) that indicated terrorists were trained at Salman Pak; there was an apparent surge of such reporting. As with past information, however, the reporting is vague and difficult to substantiate. 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.” The assessment added that CIA exploitation “found nothing of intelligence value remained and assessed that Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) cleaned it out.” The DIA assessment concluded that “we do not know whether ex-regime trained terrorists on the aircraft at Salman Pak. Intelligence in late April 2003 indicated the plane had been dismantled. DIA and CENTCOM asses the plane was sold for scrap.
”

The report also mentioned the findings of The Iraq Survey Group (see above section). By a committee vote of 8-7, the press statement by Brigadier General Vincent Brooks (see above) was removed from the report.(page 135)

Why do Libertarians support the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Simple: We see Islamo-Fascism as the greatest threat to our liberties. Islamo-Fascists want to force our wives/girlfriends to wear ugly black burqas from head to toe, cut off the genitals of our gay friends, jail our marijuana smoking buddies, and outlaw free speech.

The proper Libertarian postiion is to oppose Islamo-Fascism and the institution of Sharia Law, not to cower in its face, as some in the Anti-War fringe of our movement would have us do.

Eric Dondero, Publisher
Libertarian Republican

Fmr. Senior Aide, US Congressman Ron Paul
Founder, Republican Liberty Caucus
Fmr. Libertarian National Committeeman