Santorum Lied to Imus About Iraqi Terror Training

It's no suprise that Rick Santorum is trailing Bob Casey by 20 points in the latest poll. That's because Santorum just can't stop lying, whether the topic is where he lives or why we're in Iraq.

This morning, Santorum told Don Imus that Saddam was training terrorists from "all over the region" at a training camp in Iraq. Imus was appropriately skeptical, saying Saddam's only real link to terrorism was sending money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But Santorum insisted Saddam trained terrorists in Iraqi training camps.

This is one of the last rightwing "zombie lies" about Iraq, so here's the truth (courtesy of Media Matters) about Salman Pak:

This training camp, located near Baghdad, has been repeatedly referenced by conservative commentators to justify the Bush administration's claims of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection. In fact, though some U.S. intelligence officials -- before the U.S. invasion -- believed Saddam was training terrorists at Salman Pak, the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2004 report on pre-war intelligence assessments said the facility was used by the Iraqi Intelligence Service to "train its officers for counterterrorism operations against regime opponents." The committee further stated that it did not receive any evidence that Iraq trained "Arabs of various nationalities at the Salman Pak facility for potential surrogate terror operations" and that CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency analysts confirmed that Al Qaeda "sources" had not reported any knowledge of such training. Investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh reported in the May 12, 2003, edition of The New Yorker that the facility "was overrun by American troops on April 6th [2003]. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war."

Imus has zero tolerance for bullshit, so tell him Santorum lied to him: Imus@msnbc.com

Update 1: The Salman Pak hoax originated with Ahmed Chalabi's INC, which supplied an unidentified "Iraqi Lt. General" to the NY Times and PBS Frontline for interviews on 11/6/01 in an attempt to link Iraq to 9/11. Four years later, Frontline issued this retraction:

[Editor's Note, November 2005: More than two years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of the general's account of the activities at Salman Pak. 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. It should also be noted that the general 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. This interview was conducted by FRONTLINE and The New York Times in Beirut. The Lt. Gen. was later identified in other stories as Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, a former high-ranking officer in the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. Abu Zeinab reportedly now lives in Baghdad; he claims not to have left Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein and that the story of Salman Pak was a hoax. He maintains that the man FRONTLINE and The New York Times interviewed was an impostor provided by the INC. The INC denies this claim, and stands by the original story.]