The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing. ~Stephen Hayes, The Weekly Standard

The urban legend of the Salman Pak “terrorist training facilities” has been circulating in the fetid swamps of the militarist right for years and was thoroughly incredible even before the invasion revealed any such facilities to have been training grounds for Hussein’s fedayeen. For whatever it’s worth, in the May 12, 2003 New Yorker Seymour Hersh has reported the rather more reasonable claim that the Salman Pak camp, at least, was designed for counter-terrorism. Thus Hersh:

In 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 Britain’s 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 airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when 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. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t 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.”

Maybe, just maybe there were some Algerian Salafists running around Iraq with Hussein’s knowledge and backing, and maybe somewhere along the way these Salafists had dealings with al-Qaeda (of course, c. 2000 we still had dealings with the Taliban and in 1999 we actively aided Islamic terrorists in taking over a part of Europe–does that put us in league with al-Qaeda?). We know that the Sudanese government settled bin Laden himself for some time, only to give him the boot when “we” insisted, so wouldn’t we target Sudan ahead of Iraq in any event if we cared about connections this tenuous? If Hayes and the crowd at the Standard think that pathetic (and probably false) connection justifies invading Iraq, they are more ridiculous than we thought.