It looks like there may soon be released to the public, documentary proof, captured in Iraq, of Saddam's links to Islamist terror groups. No journalist has done more to investigate and report the story of those links than Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. His latest report is destined to be ignored in newsrooms and faculty lounges all over the country in the days ahead, such is the embarrassment it would cause them if they acknowledged it.
The former regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.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.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq War.
The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
But if the Bush administration has had proof for months, or even years now that Saddam had trained Islamist terrorists at camps in Iraq, why didn't Bush defend himself against the vicious political and personal attacks on him from media people, political opponents, condescending European bureaucrats and others who mock the suggestion that such links and cooperation existed, and instead let his opponents shape the current conventional wisdom that there was no such cooperation?
Oh, that's right. National security is supposed to be more important than electoral politics.
Hayes has led the effort to expedite the release of at least the unclassified share of the over two million documents and "exploitable items" captured since the liberation of Iraq. Now it looks as if the administration, dogged by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is finally coming around to the idea that releasing a large percentage of the captured evidence might be a good idea. Especially since they've only examined 2.5 % of the total...in two years.
Besides, most of this isn't news to people who have been paying attention. The terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, as one example, has been known about since before the invasion. So the significance of this isn't really the existence of evidence. There has long been a large quantity of evidence linking Saddam's Iraq to al Qaeda and other terror groups. This is about proof. Documents that might finally change that conventional wisdom, not to mention its potential for serving up crow to the truly needy. It is the "smoking gun" for the Juan Coles of the world
And Hayes' military intelligence sources are saying there's no doubt about Iraq's role in financing and training Islamist terrorists, including Ansar al Islam, the Iraqi al Qaeda affiliate.
"As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."
The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."
What will the media make of Stephen Hayes' reporting?
Read it all, please, and forward to any "Iraq-had-nothing-to-do-with-al Qaeda" types that you know.
Other Stephen Hayes via Wizblog
Posted by dan at January 7, 2006 1:00 AM