Saturday, January 07, 2006
Debate Over: Saddam Trained Thousands Of Jihadists
Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who has been chipping away at the problem of exploiting the documents captured from the Saddam regime, finally finds confirmation that Saddam trained jihadists in Iraqi camps for at least the four years preceding OIF, and probably going back to when he first took power.
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 approximately 50,000 documents translated thus far amounts to only 2.5 percent of those captured, and now it looks as if there is momentum gathering in the Pentagon to move the analysis into the public domain, despite concerns of "cherry picking" by those with an interest in embarrassing the Bush administration. But with the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone, the most stubborn opponent of the release of the documents, now stating his support for their widespread scrutiny, they may soon enter the public domain.
More: Bombshell: Saddam Trained Thousands of Islamic Terrorists, by Thomas Joscelyn. Debate over, indeed.
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 approximately 50,000 documents translated thus far amounts to only 2.5 percent of those captured, and now it looks as if there is momentum gathering in the Pentagon to move the analysis into the public domain, despite concerns of "cherry picking" by those with an interest in embarrassing the Bush administration. But with the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone, the most stubborn opponent of the release of the documents, now stating his support for their widespread scrutiny, they may soon enter the public domain.
More: Bombshell: Saddam Trained Thousands of Islamic Terrorists, by Thomas Joscelyn. Debate over, indeed.
