Saddam = Terrorist Trainer

Stephen Hayes has done it again with another excellent article based on the Saddam documents. This time he shoves the “there was no terrorism in Iraq before we got there” mantra back down the leftists throats:

REPRESENTATIVE John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, March 19, to evaluate the war in Iraq on its third anniversary. Murtha, a decorated veteran and longtime hawk (Wha wha wha what!), has become a leading spokesman for his party on the war. And on the show, he spoke of what “probably worries me the most” about the U.S. effort in Iraq. The war, said Murtha, is a diversion from the global war on terror.

“There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there,” said Murtha. “None. There was no connection with al Qaeda, there was no connection with, with terrorism in Iraq itself.” This is now the conventional wisdom on Iraq and terrorism. It is wrong.

A new study from the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, paints quite a different picture. According to captured documents cited in the study and first reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in January, the former Iraqi regime was training non-Iraqi Arabs in terrorist techniques.

Beginning in 1994, the Fedayeen Saddam opened its own paramilitary training camps for volunteers, graduating more than 7,200 “good men racing full with courage and enthusiasm” in the first year. Beginning in 1998, these camps began hosting “Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, ‘the Gulf,’ and Syria.” It is not clear from available evidence where all of these non-Iraqi volunteers who were “sacrificing for the cause” went to ply their newfound skills. Before the summer of 2002, most volunteers went home upon the completion of training. But these camps were humming with frenzied activity in the months immediately prior to the war. As late as January 2003, the volunteers participated in a special training event called the “Heroes Attack.” This training event was designed in part to prepare regional Fedayeen Saddam commands to “obstruct the enemy from achieving his goal and to support keeping peace and stability in the province.”

Some of this training came under the auspices of the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s “Division 27,” which, according to the study, “supplied the Fedayeen Saddam with silencers, equipment for booby-trapping vehicles, [and] special training on the use of certain explosive timers. The only apparent use for all of this Division 27 equipment was to conduct commando or terrorist operations.”

[…]It is early, but the emerging picture suggests that the U.S. intelligence community underestimated Saddam Hussein’s interest in terrorism. One U.S. intelligence official, identified only as an “IC analyst” in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on Iraq, summarized the intelligence community’s view on Iraq and terrorism with disarming candor: “I don’t think we were really focused on the CT [counterterrorism] side, because we weren’t concerned about the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] going out and proactively conducting terrorist attacks. It wasn’t until we realized that there was the possibility of going to war that we had to get a handle on that.”

A report produced by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, signed by all members of the Intelligence Committee, Democrats and Republicans, offered this withering assessment of the intelligence community’s work on Iraq and terrorism:

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did not have a focused human intelligence (HUMINT) collection strategy targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until 2002. The CIA had no [redacted] sources on the ground in Iraq reporting specifically on terrorism.

It wasn’t just Iraq. “The CIA had no [redacted] credible reporting on the leadership of either the Iraqi regime or al Qaeda, which would have enabled it to better define a cooperative relationship, if any did in fact exist.”

One document posted on the Internet by the government last week, after it was excerpted in the most recent issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, sheds additional light on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. The internal Iraqi Intelligence memo was written at some point after January 1997 and described the efforts by the IIS to strengthen its relationships with four Saudi opposition groups. One of those groups was the “Reform and Advice Committee,” run by Osama bin Laden. The New York Times reported that a Pentagon task force that studied the document concluded that it “appeared authentic.” Last week, the investigative unit of ABC News summarized the document in a report.

A newly released prewar Iraqi document indicates that an official representative of Saddam Hussein’s government met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan on February 19, 1995, after receiving approval from Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested “carrying out joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam’s presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995, and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further “development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what’s open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation.” The Sudanese were informed about the agreement to dedicate the program on the radio.

[…]John Murtha’s claim–that there was no connection “with terrorism in Iraq itself”–might come as a surprise to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines. In early April 2003, they found a ten-acre terrorist training camp ten miles outside of Baghdad. In an interview at the time with an embedded reporter from Stars & Stripes, Captain Aaron Robertson said: “We believe this is a training camp where Iraqis trained forces for the Palestine Liberation Front. This is what we would refer to as a sensitive site. This is clearly a terrorist training camp, the type Iraq claimed did not exist.”

[…]One key element in shaping the conventional wisdom on Iraq and terrorism was the 9/11 Commission Report, which found that Iraq and al Qaeda had no “collaborative operational relationship.” But the day that report was released, Commissioner John Lehman offered this prophetic warning in an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “There may well be–and probably will be–additional intelligence coming in from interrogations and from analysis of captured records and so forth which will fill out the intelligence picture. This is not phrased as, nor meant to be, the definitive word on Iraqi Intelligence activities.”

The funny thing is that when people such as Murtha or other leftists are asked about these documents all they can mutter is how none of this is substantiated. They WANT to believe that Saddam was just a regular old dictator who didn’t harm any other country, he minded his own business killing his own peeps so why should we have gone in.

Will they ever admit they were wrong about Saddam, and that he did indeed harbor and aide terrorists including one Osama Bin Laden? Nope. They would rather jump off a cliff then to have their Bush hatred proven wrong.

Curt

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