No Ties To Terrorism? No Ties To al Qaeda? Utter BS

Yesterday I posted up a blockbuster story written by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard. It was all about the recently declassified documents revolving around Saddam Hussein's terrorist ties; a myth that is now finally debunked fully. Mr. Hayes isn't the first person to crush this myth. I'll cite another person who's debunked it, as well, later in this post. But right now, I'd like to focus on the facts.

From 1999 to 2002, Saddam Hussein had three primary terrorist training camps: Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak. Everyone who has been paying attention to Iraq for awhile knows about Salman Pak; that's the place where the airliner body was found that was used to train people how to hijack/commandeer jet liners. Mr. Hayes, in his piece, cites a few groups working with Saddam Hussein including, but not limited to, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al-Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. We also know that he has financed groups such as the PLO, the PLF, al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, Abu Nidal Organization, Arab Liberation Front, Kurdistan Workers Party, and el-Fatah. These two lists read like a literal murderer's row of radical Islam.

But people continue to hype that he "had no ties to al Qaeda," who is our main enemy in this war. I contend that he did, and that there are plenty of declassified documents that show exactly that. The following comes from Richard Miniter's newest book "Disinformation," and is the most damning debunking of this myth.

--An Iraqi defector to Turkey known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed" told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in the fedayeen, a brutal strike force that reported directly to Saddam Hussein. Mohammed described an encounter at the Salman Pak training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives--practicing on a full-size Boeing 707. Colonel Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed a lot of people were queing for food. [The major] said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK [a Muslim terror group known for atrocities in Turkey] and Mojahedin-e Khalq [a terror group active in Pakistan]."

--After the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Ravi Nessam, an Associated Press reporter, noted that satellite photos of "Salman Pak, about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad...show an urban assault training site, a three-car train for railway-attack instruction, and a commercial airliner sitting all by itself in the middle of the desert."

--Nessam continued: "Speaking at an April 6, 2005 press conference, General [Vincent] Brooks said: 'The nature of the work being done by some of those people captured, their influences to the type of training they received, all of these things give us the impression that there was terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak.' "

--Nationally syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock sifted through the publicly available information about al Qaeda operatives training at Salman Pak, and reported on "Sabah Khodada, a former Iraqi army captain who once worked at Salman Pak. On October 14, 2001, Khodada granted an interview to the PBS television program Frontline stating 'This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world.' " "He added: ' Training includes hijacking and kidnapping of airplanes, trains, public buses, and planting explosives in cities...how to prepare for suicidal
operations.' " "He continued: 'We saw people getting trained to hijack planes...They are even trained how to use utensils for food, like forks and knives provided in the plane' " to hijack the aircraft.

--In the spring of 1998, the Iraqi regime promised to provide "weapons development" assistance to al Qaeda. "The following, according to 9-11 Commission Staff Statement 15, bin Laden took the Iraqis up on their pledge. [Iraqi intelligence officer Farouk al-] Hijazi told his interrogators in May 2003 that bin Laden had specifically requested [from Iraq] Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines as well as training camps in Iraq.

--Mohammed Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until he was killed by the US in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in US custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to learn how to make chemical weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell asked "Where did they go, where did they look? They went to Iraq."

--The Iraqis had the Third World's largest poison gas operation prior to the 1991 Gulf War and had perfected the technique of making hydrogen cyanide gas. The Nazis used to call that gas Zyklon-B. (For the record, that's the gas used on the Jews, as confirmed through Eichmann's transcripts of the Wannssee Conference.--Publius II) In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a fearsome weapon in an enclosed space--like a suburban mall or subway station.

--Summing up his agency's view, then CIA director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2003: "Iraq in the past has providedtraining in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gases to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as 'successful.' Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

No ties to terrorism? According to the US government, his ties to terrorism are open, explicit, and scary. Many of the groups this man worked with in the Middle East we've been dealing with since the late 1970s. Terrorism's been around a lot longer than that, but that was the first time this nation became a target of radical Islamo-fascists. And this history--all the information above, and those posted yesterday--should silence those that keep stating that no radical Islamicist would work with Saddam Hussein because he was "secular." To those people I only have one answer for you.

Those that do not listen to the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them.

"The enemy of my enemy is my ally" is a creed used by strategists since the beginning of civilization. Saddam Hussein had an enemy in the United States. So did the terrorists. It matters not what their reason for emnity; only that both were linked in hatred towards the US. We should also be reminded that from 1999 to 2003, Hamas operated an office in Baghdad, and that Iraq frequently hosted conferences attended by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And this isn't the first time that Stephen Hayes has dealt with the al Qaeda/Iraq issue. He wrote a book called "The Connection." In it, Hayes states the following:

"The Islamic conferences were not just another attempt of Saddam's to ingratiate himself with the fundamentalists. According to several US officials, the summits were crawling with Iraqi intelligence agents regruiting these radicals to help fight a terror war against the West."

Don't tell me that there were no connections. Don't tell me we didn't have justification for going into Iraq. We did find weapons of mass destruction, components, scematics, and records of those programs. Numerous Iraqi scientists have testified before Congress--including both Intelligence committees--that Hussein's nuclear program could have pulled a crash start, and little time would have been lost in terms of the advancement of those programs. And those WMDs are compiled, and available to the public.

But our greater reason for going in, according to the president's 14 Sept. speech, was to stop terrorism. We were going after them, and if nations refused to divest themselves of those elements, they'd be on our s**t-list, too. Iraq was one of those nations. Based on the information out now, I'd say it was a central point for terrorism. Like the ayatollahs in Iran, Assad in Syria, and the radical, unchecked imams in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein was dealing in terrorism. It was a "tradeable commodity" to him, and recognized the sort of weapon he would possess in a terrorist army. His desire for such an army was manifest in his dreaded fedayeen. A weapon of mass destruction? Yes, Saddam was such a thing, not only in his drive to achieve such devastating weapons for himself, but also in an army that could serve as the weapon's delivery system.

Publius II