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.
“I never believed in the link between Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright flatly declared in an October 21, 2003 essay published in Australia’s Melbourne Herald Sun.“Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one,” Senator Ted Kennedy said October 16, 2003.
“Iraq was not a terrorist haven before the invasion,” Democratic candidate John Kerry told Philadelphia voters September 24.
As Steven Hayes points out:
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.
Don’t expect Katie Couric to invite Hayes on the Today Show anytime soon. In fact, don’t expect to see this report in, well… really any MSM outlet. This is not the kind of news the Left wanted to hear as we enter into a new election cycle. They’d staked their future on opposing Bush, not because they knew he was wrong, but because they thought he might never be able to prove himself right.
Again, they were wrong.
