AT OUR SUMMER CAMP WE BRAIDED LANYARDS:

Khadr trained at key terrorist base: 'Everybody went': Khaldun Camp was fount of terror plots (Stewart Bell, December 02, 2003, National Post)

A Canadian recently released from Guantanamo Bay admitted at a news conference yesterday he had undergone weapons training at Khaldun Camp, a notorious al-Qaeda terrorist base in Afghanistan.

Speaking at his lawyer's office a day after returning to Canada, Abdurahman Khadr said he spent three months training under Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan known to intelligence agencies as a top al-Qaeda trainer.

"It was an al-Qaeda-related training camp," said Mr. Khadr, 20, adding he attended the camp in 1998 at the behest of his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, wanted by the United States for his suspected ties to Osama bin Laden.

He said he learned how to use Russian assault rifles and that his older brother Abdullah had also trained, but he said that was "a very normal thing" and that many young men trained to fight the Northern Alliance rebels then at war with the Taliban.

"Everybody went to training camp in Afghanistan," he said. [...]

Khaldun Camp has been described by intelligence agencies and captured terrorists such as Ahmed Ressam of Montreal as an important terrorist training base for radical Arabs and Muslims from around the world.

Foreign recruits went there to learn how to build bombs and how to use them to blow up civilian targets such as airports, gas plants and hotels, Ressam testified. Plots to attack the U.S. and Israel were hatched at the camp, he said.

Professor Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies, said Mr. Khadr's description of a camp that hosted foreign trainees is "exactly the problem isn't it? That's exactly what terrorists did.

"First, to train for a foreign military is not consistent with Canadian citizenship," said Prof. Rudner, who teaches at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University.

"We don't have Canadians sign up in other people's armies and other people's wars, and receive military training.

"Secondly, isn't that precisely what terrorism is about -- taking people from various countries and training them on tactics, methods, explosives and techniques which are tantamount to terrorism?"

Why'd we release him? We should have shot him.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2003 9:38 AM