By The Way...Iraq Trained Terrorists

To the heartbreak of moonbats everywhere, it appears that vindication is the word of the day - for President Bush, that is. The treasure trove of documents gleaned from Iraq in the days after the war are starting to pay off.

Iraq trained terrorists. Extensively so.

THE FORMER IRAQI 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.

Yes, it does.

Now I could also go off spouting about how good things come to those who wait, or how patience is a virtue. But I won't bother. This stuff needs to be sifted through right now, and released to the media.

Of course you may be asking why it's taken so long for this stuff to come out. There are two reasons.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

So it appears the hunt for WMD, while insanely important, trumped looking for terrorist training. Now one thing to clarify, the "gotcha" mode of the press and the DNC talking points has clouded the extent to which our intelligence services, and ally intelligence services, tracked terror links to the regime. There were links to terrorists, most assuredly. But the naysayers and disgruntled leakers always gave the press the soundbites they needed to drive a wedge between reality and their fantasy of a secular Saddam vs. Fundamentalist terrorists (never the twain shall meet, so to speak).

I've always found this hypothesis rather ridiculous. The motivations of a dictator is one of power, advantage, ego, envy and fear. Yes, they are afraid. And Saddam feared everyone, even his own people. But he was a savvy despot, and as Stephen Hayes points out:

Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."

And that is exactly the same type of links we're seeing today with the terrorists and the remains of the regime insurgents. The simplistic notion that religion is anathema to the secular is a liberal projection of their own aversion to religion - because note how the secular left is more than willing to use religion for their own purposes (Howard Dean talking about courting religious voters after saying everyone needs to stop voting on "God, guns and gays"). Their break with reality leaves them at a disadvantage when it comes to deciphering the motives and wiles of a user like Saddam.

To them he becomes the misunderstood grandfather, tricked by the evil America during the Cold War and afflicted with a bad case of penis envy. Yet all the while the mass graves are still being uncovered, the tales of torture and murder continue to sicken, the tentacles he put around the U.N. and the world powers are still strangling them, and - surprise! - Saddam used terrorists to further his own ends.

But this escapes the average reporter, and does not fit with the known media line. And so of course, this is why early ideas about releasing these documents to the media were shouted down.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has blocked this every step of the way."

Now, I sympathize. The war against the Bush administration has been carried out by the DNC, the print and televised media, and an army of Democrat leakers in the bureaucracy. It's been a hell of a fight. And of course, without widespread WMD finds or a love note penned by Osama to Saddam, it's been impossible to get the mainstream press to relent in their march to impeachment and surrender.

But now is the time to fight back. And it appears that the administration is ready.

Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

And apparently we ain't seen nothing yet. The links are broad, extensive, and presented a danger beyond what our intelligence services new.

Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.

Yeah, let that sink in for a second. Remember how happy the media was to report how wrong we were about WMD? Let's see if they'll report this "error" in intelligence as well.

Probably not. Because it would mean the war was worth it.

(for more extensive coverage on this, see Michelle Malkin) And as she says:

This is important news. It ought to be on the front pages. It won't be. So spread the word.

Yes. Everyone must spread the word. This goes to the heart of the war on terror.