Should Stephen Hayes’ new Weekly Standard article, “Saddam’s Terrorist Training Camps”, receive any notice outside the right side of the blogosphere, the predictable spin will be that it doesn’t matter; if there weren’t any WMD’s, Bush is a liar, and that’s all there is to that. We aren’t likely to see Mr. Hayes’ findings resounding in newspaper headlines and the six o’clock news.
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 above8,000. . . .
“As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein’s] support for transregional terrorists,” says one intelligenceofficial. . . .
“[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.”
Assuming that Mr. Hayes’ informants are describing the documents accurately (and we’ll find out soon enough, because the Department of Defense apparently is nearing a decision to release them to the public), there are two important lessons.
First, whether or not the Ba’athist regime had or aspired to have significant chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry, it had both the means and the will to fund and support terrorist operations against America and its allies. Preventing it from churning out more terrorists was, in and of itself, a sufficient casus belli.
Second, this information took two years to emerge from the masses of captured documentation. Iraq’s role in terrorist training was largely unknown before Saddam’s ouster, nor was it immediately evident as our troops swept through the country. It was therefore easy to argue e silentio that Saddam had no operational ties with terrorist groups.
The same argument from silence is the main prop of those who deny that Iraq possessed chemical weapons or was pursuing biological and nuclear warfare capabilities. It will be interesting to see what the picture looks like when more from the Saddam era trove, which reportedly amounts to over two million pages, becomes available. I doubt that it will make the Iraqi tyrant look like an innocent victim of American imperialism.
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