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www.mshrimpton.co.uk Biography
Michael Shrimpton is a barrister specialising in national security and intelligence law, who negotiated the national security aspects of the Pinochet case with the late Lt-General Vernon Walters, formerly Deputy Director of the CIA. He has represented and advised intelligence officers and is believed to have close connections to a number of Western intelligence services. He has briefed staffers on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9-11, and participated in panels on terrorism for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in Washington DC and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA. He has observed terrorists at close quarters on the Israel/Lebanon frontier, actively assisted police and law enforcement agencies in the War on Terror and recently visited Russia, where he met senior government officials. He has a wide range of Western defence, intelligence and security contacts.

Michael was instrumental in exposing the notorious photograph of a hooded prisoner, allegedly taken at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq, as a forgery and was prominent in calling for a full inquest, with a jury, following the assassination of weapons scientist Dr. David Kelly CMG in July 2003. He also played a major role in uncovering the Iraqi Air Force's acquisition of a Boeing 767 simulator, stolen from Kuwait Airways at Kuwait Airport in August 1990. He was of course fully aware of the significance of this discovery, given the cockpit commonality between the Boeing 757 and 767, and Al Qaeda's restriction to these two types on 9-11.

He specialises in counter-terrorism, aviation law (particularly in cases involving allegations of sabotage), counter-intelligence, counter-assassination, and counter-proliferation. He was trained to fly by the Royal Air Force (University of Wales Air Squadron) and soloed in 1979.

Michael has written on national security matters for the Journal of International Security Affairs and is currently working on a major article on the Laws of War and the need, or lack of it, for UN sanction before commencing hostilities. He has appeared on CNN and the BBC and is regularly consulted by the media on national security and intelligence matters, including the BBC TV drama series "Spooks," broadcast in the USA as "MI5."

Michael Shrimpton was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn in 1983 and made a part-time Chairman of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal in 1992. He is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), the United States Naval Institute (USNI), the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the Defence and Security Forum, the Military Commentators Circle, the European-Atlantic Group and the Royal Air Force Historical Society. He is a Fellow of the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom. Michael is also a member of the American Trial Lawyers Association and its Aviation Law Section, and international member of the ABA.

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Session IN13: Iraq: Then and Now
February 18, 11:00 - 11:45 IRAQ STATE INVOLVEMENT IN THE FAILED TERRORIST ATTACK ON THE USS COLE (DDG-67) AND THE TERRORIST ATTACKS ON NEW YORK CITY AND WASHINGTON DC SEPTEMBER 11 2001
Abstract:
Michael Shrimpton is an intelligence expert who has made a careful study of the links between the Republic of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence organisation and the Al Qaeda al-Sulbah terrorist organisation. Shrimpton will detail the origins of the Ba'ath Party in the 1930s, its close connection to the NSDAP, and the contacts between the German Abwehr intelligence organisation and the Ba'ath Party and the master Islamic terrorist organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, created as a front for German intelligence in Egypt in 1928, with a view to mounting terrorist and sabotage actions in British-controlled territories in the Middle East and gaining control of Middle East oil for what became Nazi Germany.

He will name the Abwehr's Head of Station in Cairo in WW2, his deputy and the key link man between the failed pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad in 1941 and his protege Saddam Hussein. He will detail how the Abwehr's networks in the Middle East, including Iraq and Libya, were never broken up after 1945 and were taken over by the covert DVD intelligence agency, based to the present day in Dachau, Munich, Bavaria, initially under the operational leadership of GeneralLeutnant Erwin von Lahousen.

He will point out how the failure to understand the deep links behind Islamic terrorism and the allegedly secular Ba'ath Party has led ill-informed media commentators and so-called terrorism experts to obsess on the surface religious differences between Ba'ath Party and Al Qaeda leaders. He will detail Osama bin Laden's first visit to Baghdad, and list contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraqi, Sudanese and Pakistani intelligence, naming names. He will comment on the efforts to Islamicise the regime after its defeat in 1991, and the conferences held in Baghdad to improve relations with Islamic groups, as the intelligence relationship with Al Qaeda grew.

He will specify the assistance given by Iraq in the failed attempt to sink the USS Cole and the training provided by Iraq to the 9-11 terrorists, including the use of a Boeing 767 simulator, tracked down partly through Michael's efforts. He will summarise the evidence linking Iraq with the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, pay respectful tribute to the FBI agent who at great risk to his own life exposed those links (and died before his time), and state his reasons for concluding that the Iraqi Mukhabarat intelligence service provided planning, logistical and technical support for the 9-11 attacks, justifying the waging of total war by the United States and the United Kingdom on the Republic of Iraq.